Wall Street to open lower

New York stock exchanges are expected to open lower on Friday, due to mounting tensions between the United States and China following Beijing’s announcement of a new controversial Hong Kong security law. In addition, investors on Wall Street will continue to monitor developments around the corona virus and some operating results will be processed.

Prime Minister Li Keqiang announced at the National People’s Congress that he will introduce new laws to ensure “national security” in Hong Kong and Macau. Beijing wants the law mainly to get a better grip on the anti-Chinese and pro-democratic protests in Hong Kong. President Donald Trump warned that the US will “react strongly” if China enacts the law.

Technology group IBM can count on interest. The company is said to be cutting thousands of jobs against the crisis, especially in North America.

Consultations between car rental company Hertz and its creditors about deferred payments have stalled, according to insider Bloomberg news agency. A deadline will expire later Friday. Hertz ran into problems when both business trips and vacations ceased due to the corona measures that many countries took. As a result, hardly more cars were rented.

Tractor builder Deere opened the books on the quarterly digit front. Results were clearly down due to the corona crisis and Deere expects earnings to be much lower this fiscal year. Deere says significant spending and investment cuts are being made to cope with the impact of the virus outbreak.

The maker of chips and graphics cards Nvidia also came with numbers. Those were much higher than a year earlier. Nvidia took advantage of the high demand for data center products as lockdowns make companies increasingly dependent on cloud applications.

New York-listed Chinese internet giant and online store Alibaba has grown slower in recent times than in previous periods. Corona measures did lead to more turnover for the cloud services of the tech company because more people had to work at home.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is set to cut costs significantly after disappointing last quarter results. HPE is heavily red-listed. Other quarterly companies included network equipment maker Palo Alto Networks and sports retailer Foot Locker.

There is no news to report in the macroeconomic field.

The Dow-Jones index ended 0.4 percent lower on Thursday at 24,474.12 points. The broad S&P 500 went down 0.8 percent to 2,948.51 points, and technology exchange Nasdaq lost 1 percent to 9,284.88 points.