Aerial drone view of Tokyo cityscape with Tokyo Sky Tree visible at sunrise in Tokyo, Japan.
Panacea Kluetong | Moment | Getty Images
Asia-Pacific markets were set to fall on Monday on news that U.S. President Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.
As investors return from the weekend, they are also assessing the impact of Friday's massive global IT outage. Machines running Microsoft's Windows operating system crashed on Friday due to a glitchy update issued by a cybersecurity firm mass strike. CrowdStrike's shares plunged 11% on Friday.
Microsoft say in one The blog post for the weekend is probably 8.5 million Windows devices (less than 1% of all Windows computers) affected.
This week, investors will be watching GDP data from South Korea and the United States, as well as data on factory activity in the region.
On Monday, market focus will be on the People's Bank of China's decision on the preferential loan interest rate. Economists polled by Reuters expect that the one-year and five-year loan preferential interest rates will remain unchanged at 3.45% and 3.95% respectively.
The one-year LPR serves as the benchmark for most corporate loans, and the five-year LPR serves as the reference interest rate for mortgage loans.
Other economic data this week includes inflation data from the U.S. on Friday and Singapore on Tuesday.
South Korea will also release its second-quarter GDP forecast on Thursday, and the United States will release its second-quarter GDP forecast on Friday.
Australian futures S&P/ASX 200 Index It closed at 7,876 points, lower than Friday's last closing price of 7,971.60 points.
Japan's Nikkei 225 Index The opening will also be weaker, with the Chicago Nikkei futures contract at 39,845 points and the Osaka Nikkei futures contract at 39,590 points, below the index's last closing price of 40,603.79 points. At this level, the index would hit its lowest level in three weeks.
In contrast, Hong Kong Hang Seng Index Hang Seng Index futures are expected to open higher, at 17,450 points compared with the previous closing price of 17,417.68 points.
On Wall Street, all three major indexes retreated on Friday as U.S. stocks ended the week as this year's large-cap winners rotated into smaller stocks.
The S&P 500 fell 0.71% and the technology-heavy Nasdaq fell 0.81%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 377.49 points, or 0.93%, to 40,287.53 points.
—CNBC’s Alex Harring and Jesse Pound contributed to this report.