Chinese stocks are getting slammed
While Wednesday’s big markets headline was the Dow Jones Industrial Average cracking 22,000 for the first time, there is a lot of pain in the markets on Wednesday.
And few areas of the market are getting hit as hard as U.S.-listed stocks of Chinese companies on Wednesday.
Among the notable losers on Wednesday were shares of Alibaba (BABA), Baidu (BIDU), JD.com (JD), and NetEase (NTES). Near 11:30 a.m. ET, each of these stocks was off more than 2%, with NetEase leading the losses down 3.6%.
The decline in Chinese stocks follows stories out over the last 12 or so hours that indicate the Trump administration is in talks on making what would be its first big trade action against China. Recall that President Trump has in the past singled out China as a currency-manipulator and blamed China during the presidential campaign for stealing U.S. manufacturing jobs.
According to a report in The Financial Times on Wednesday morning, the Trump administration is weighing a probe into “a Chinese intellectual property regime that requires foreign companies to transfer technology to local subsidiaries and partners.”
Over the weekend, Trump lashed out at Beijing on Twitter, writing, “I am very disappointed in China. Our foolish past leaders have allowed them to make hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade, yet [they] do NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk.
“We will no longer allow this to continue,” the president added. “China could easily solve this problem!”
On Wednesday, stocks were mixed across the board with shares of Apple (AAPL) bolstering the Dow.
The U.S. dollar was also sitting at a 15-month low and had erased all of its post-election gains.
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Myles Udland is a writer at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @MylesUdland
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