Asian market were lower on Thursday, 25 June 2020, on tracking negative lead from Wall Street overnight after the US signalled possible new tariffs on European goods and the International Monetary Fund slashed its global economic forecasts again on Wednesday.
The U.S. Trade Representative said it was weighing new tariffs on US$3.1 billion (RM13.2 billion) in European goods amid a dispute over subsidies to planemaker Airbus, ratcheting up a fresh trade war tensions with the European Union. The Trump administration also has been threatening to reimposing tariffs on imports of aluminum from Canada on July 1 as the new USMCA, or the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, is set to take effect.
Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund cut its economic forecast for 2020, saying that the coronavirus pandemic has caused an unprecedented decline in global activity. The IMF dropped its global economic growth expectations for this year to negative 4.9%. That's almost two percentage points lower than three months ago. In 2021, global growth is expected to rebound to a 5.4% growth rate, still leaving the level of GDP about 6.5 percentage points lower than the pre-COVID-19 projections in January.
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