Tokyo Stocks Dive amid Crude Surge; Nikkei Down Over 4,000 Points

Tokyo, March 9 (Jiji Press)–Tokyo stocks plummeted Monday morning due to a surge in crude oil prices reflecting rising Middle East tensions, with the key Nikkei 225 average losing more than 4,000 points. At 10:53 a.m., the Nikkei stood at 51,526.70, down 4,094.14 points, or 7.36 pct, from Friday’s closing, slipping below 52,000 for the first time since Jan. 9. In off-hours trading Sunday, key U.S. crude oil futures shot up to exceed 111 dollars per barrel, up 22 pct from late last week and hitting the highest level since July 2022, after the start of Russia’s full-fledged aggression against Ukraine in late February that year. The surge came as anxiety about crude oil supplies grew further after the Israeli military conducted an airstrike on an oil storage facility in Teheran on Saturday, apparently marking the first time that an Iranian oil facility has been targeted since the United States and Israel began their military operations against Iran on Feb. 28. A wide range of stocks met with selling on the Tokyo market Monday because investors are increasingly concerned that the Iran conflict will last long following news that Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was selected as the country’s new supreme leader to succeed his father, who was killed in the U.S.-Israeli attacks, market sources said. Also behind the plunge of Tokyo stocks was a drop of the U.S. equity market Friday, which was traced to worries about U.S. economic slowdown due to disappointing U.S. employment data for February, released the same day, the sources said. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]