Europe, US markets rally on China rate cut

European and US shares rebounded on bargain-hunting today as China cut interest rates after fears of a slowdown in the world's second-biggest economy sparked a "Black Monday" rout across global markets.
Another slump in Chinese stocks had sparked pandemonium on the first trading day of the week, wiping about USD 2.7 trillion off global equities as bourses from London to Buenos Aires were snared in a precipitous plunge.
Shanghai shares dived 7.63 per cent today, extending their steepest drop in almost two decades, erasing the year's gains and closing below the key 3,000 point mark for the first time in 2015.

But European equities which suffered their worst slump yesterday since the 2008 financial crisis surged as the Chinese central bank moved to slash interest rates for the fifth time in nine months.
Frankfurt and Paris closed up more than 4.0 per cent, while London gained 3.09 per cent.
Wall Street shares also jumped rallying after a five-day streak of losses left US indices in correction territory.

Around midday in New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 2.38 per cent, the broad-based S&P 500 gained 2.48 per cent, and the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index rose 3.29 per cent.
"I'm not surprised to see the market move up, given the magnitude of the sell-off we've seen the past four days and the moves made by China after the market close in terms of cutting rates," Michael James, managing director of equity trading at Wedbush Securities Inc in Los Angeles, told Bloomberg News.

"The question is whether these levels will hold, and the only guarantee is another day of volatility."
The dollar also gained today against other currencies and oil prices rose.
But slowing growth in China has long kept investors on edge and the shock devaluation of the yuan two weeks ago, following a string of weak economic data, spooked the markets.
"Yesterday's sell-off may have been overdone but the underlying fears remain. The Chinese economy is slowing and the more we see its markets collapse, the more concerned investors are going to become," said Craig Erlam at trading firm Oanda.
"We have seen before that these large crashes can either spark or act as a warning of a global recession and given how fragile many economies still are, it would be naive to think the same couldn't happen again."

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang insisted today there was no basis for the yuan currency to weaken further and said the exchange rate would be maintained at a "basically stable" level, state media reported.