European shares joined the global sell-off early on Friday, the pan-European Stoxx 600 falling 1.6 percent in early trade and wiping out its gains for the week. Most major European markets were down more than 1 percent, with media, healthcare and retail stocks leading the falls, after European markets had weathered the week’s turbulence better than their counterparts in the United States and Asia.
In Asia on Friday the Nikkei 225 fell 5.5 percent in early trade, South Korea’s Kospi slid as much as 8.8 percent and triggered a circuit breaker that halted trading for 20 minutes, and Taiwan’s Taiex was down more than 8 percent, with Samsung down 7 percent, SK Hynix and SoftBank each down 16 percent and TSMC down 5.9 percent. That followed Thursday’s Wall Street rout, in which the Nasdaq fell 5.52 percent and shed as much as $2.5 trillion in market value while the S&P 500 fell 4.4 percent. Deutsche Welle attributed the selling to anxiety over the scale of AI spending and to the US midterm results, in which Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress after a number of Democratic governors-elect campaigned on slowing AI development and pausing data centre construction. “It’s pretty clear there’s been a real shift in sentiment,” Michael McCarthy, chief executive for Australia and New Zealand at the online brokerage Moomoo, told Reuters.