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Asian stocks tumble, dollar edged down as tariff deadline focused

As President Donald Trump's trade deadline looms next week, most Asian equity markets struggled Friday, despite overnight record highs on Wall Street.

As traders weighed the implications of Trump's sweeping spending bill, the dollar lost some of its gains from Thursday.

Japan's Nikkei gained 0.3% at 0152 GMT, after trading in the early hours saw gains and losses.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell 1.3% while mainland Chinese blue-chips edged lower.

Taiwan's equity index lost its early gains and fell by 0.2%. South Korea's KOSPI fell more than 1%.

The U.S. S&P futures index dipped by 0.2% after the cash index had risen overnight by 0.8% to reach a new closing high. Wall Street will be closed on Friday in observance of Independence Day.

Investors cheered on a surprising robust jobs report, sending all three main U.S. equity indices soaring in a short session.

The House approved Trump's 869-page signature bill after the vote ended. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, this would add $3.4 trillion dollars to the $36.2 trillion national debt.

Trump said that he will also start sending letters to his trade partners, stating their tariff rates. Deals are still elusive before the deadline of July 9.

After announcing an agreement with Vietnam on Tuesday, the U.S. president said that he expects "a few" more agreements to be added to the framework agreements signed with China and Britain.

Scott Bessent, the U.S. Treasury secretary, said this week that an agreement with India was close. The White House had once said that agreements with Japan and South Korea would be announced as soon as possible. However, it appears these deals have fallen through.

Tony Sycamore is an analyst with IG. He said that the lack of confidence in the market for the deals was responsible for the weakness of equity markets around the world, especially Japan and South Korea.

Sycamore stated that the jobs data on Thursday showed "the U.S. Economy is holding up better than most people anticipated, which indicates to me that markets could easily continue to perform better from here."

The data on jobs led traders to abandon any expectation of a Federal Reserve rate cut in this month.

The U.S. Dollar rallied on Thursday, rising as high as 0.7% against a basket major counterparts before it pared back its gains to finish the session at 0.4%.

The U.S. dollar gave up some of its gains early on Friday. It fell 0.2% to 144.62 Japanese yen, and 0.1% to 0.7942 Swiss Franc.

The euro rose 0.1% to $1.1766 while the sterling traded unchanged at $1.3650.

The U.S. Treasury Bond market is closed on Friday due to the holiday. However, 10-year yields increased 4.7 basis points to 4.34% and the 2-year yield rose 9.3 bps at 3.882%.

Gold rose 0.1%, to $3329.54 an ounce.

Brent crude futures climbed 1 cent to $68.81 per barrel while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude gained 3 cents to $70.73. (Reporting and editing by Stephen Coates; Kevin Buckland)

(source: Reuters)