ASIAN shares were mostly higher Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2023, boosted by a rally on Wall Street that came ahead of some potentially market-moving reports due later in the week.

The weak yen also piqued buying sentiment in Japan, as that boosts the earnings of the nation’s exporters when converting overseas profits into yen.

Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 rose one percent to finish at 26,446.00. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.9 percent to 7,195.30. South Korea’s Kospi edged up 0.4 percent to 2,359.53. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose 0.4 percent to 21,408.65, while the Shanghai Composite dipped 0.2 percent to 3,161.84.

Shares of Fast Retailing Co., which operates the popular Japanese Uniqlo clothing retailer, rose 1.4 percent in morning trading after the company announced that it was raising the salaries of its workers by up to 40 percent.

The move is aimed at “greatly strengthening its investment in personnel, remunerating each and every employee appropriately for their ambition and talents, as well as increasing the company’s growth potential and competitiveness in line with global standards,” the company said in a statement.

On Wall Street, the S&P 500 rose 0.7 percent to 3,919.25 after drifting between small gains and losses throughout the day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.6 percent to 33,704.10, and the Nasdaq composite climbed one percent to 10,742.63.

The stock market has had a positive start to 2023 helped by hopes that cooling inflation and a slowing economy may convince the Federal Reserve to ease off its markets-shaking hikes to interest rates. Since early last year, the Fed has been raising rates at a furious pace to bring painful inflation under control. Such moves risk causing a recession and hurting investment prices.

Thursday update

Investors were hoping for some clues about where the Fed is heading from its chair, Jerome Powell, who spoke at a forum in Stockholm on Tuesday. But he gave little news about rates.

The next big event for markets is likely Thursday’s update on December US inflation at the consumer level. Economists expect it to show price gains slowed further, to 6.5 percent from 7.1 percent in November and from a peak of more than nine percent in the summer.

A worse-than-expected reading could dash the building hopes on Wall Street that the Fed may stop its hikes soon and perhaps even cut rates by the end of the year. Some investors see the economy successfully walking the tightrope of slowing enough to snuff out high inflation but not so much as to cause a painful recession. / AP