Wall Street joins Ukraine relief rally; oil hits 14
Credit: Reuters/Issei Kato
A man is reflected on an electronic stock quotation board outside a brokerage in Tokyo April 9, 2014.
MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was up 0.2 percent.
Tokyo's Nikkei gained 0.2 percent.
News late on Friday that Ukrainian forces said they had destroyed a Russian military column in Ukrainian territory initially hit Wall Street, drove down government bond yields and boosted safe-haven currencies like the yen and Swiss franc.
U.S. stocks eventually pared their losses as risk appetite partially returned.
Still, with the four-month conflict reaching a critical phase over the weekend - Kiev and Western governments are nervously watching if Russia will intervene in support of the increasingly besieged rebels in eastern Ukraine- equity market gains were kept limited.
'A feeling of complacency had been creeping back into investor psychology last week with a general feeling that perhaps the declines at the start of the month were overdone,' Jasper Lawler, market analyst at CMC Markets, said in a note to clients.
'The encounter in Ukraine was a hefty reminder that geopolitics cannot be ignored,' he said.
The dollar stood little changed at 102.37 yen after sliding from a 10-day peak of 102.72 on Friday.
The euro was also flat, at $1.3389 having being lifted from an intraday low of $1.3359 on Friday as the greenback was hit by a sharp fall in Treasury yields.
The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield dropped to as low as 2.30 percent on Friday, lowest since June 2013, in wake of the Ukraine news.
Apart from geopolitics, currency and bond markets will be focused on the Aug. 21-23 annual meeting of top central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyoming for possible clues about the path for monetary policy in the months ahead.
In commodities, Brent crude oil slipped a little but kept the gains made on Friday when it jumped more than $1.50 on the Ukraine news. Brent crude was down 53 cents at $103.00 a barrel. [O/R]
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