HONG KONG — Asian shares declined Friday tracking Wall Street losses, while oil prices fell with Brent crude trading at around US$105 a barrel after hitting its highest level since May. U.S. futures edged higher. Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped 1.9 per cent to 64,011.34. Shares of multinational investment holding firm SoftBank Group, an investor of OpenAI, fell almost 4 per cent. South Korea’s Kospi lost 1.8 per cent to 6,909.91. Samsung Electronics slid 3.5 per cent, while memory chipmaker SK Hynix declined 2.2 per cent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dipped 0.7 per cent to 24,789.07. The Shanghai Composite index was down 1.2 per cent to 3,888.11. Shares of Chinese AI chipmaker Enflame surged 179 per cent in its trading debut in Shanghai. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 fell 0.9 per cent to 8,741.20. Taiwan’s Taiex lost 1.6 per cent, while India’s Sensex declined 0.5 per cent. Oil prices fell Friday after climbing earlier, as tensions between the U.S. and Iran intensified. Brent crude, the international standard, was 2.3 per cent lower at $105.14 per barrel after earlier rising above $108. It was approximately $72 a barrel in late February, before the start of the war. Benchmark U.S. crude was down 2 per cent to $100.46 per barrel. Oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway critical for global oil transport, remained “well below pre-war levels,” wrote ING commodities strategists Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey in a commentary Friday. That’s “underscoring how fragile the situation has become,” they said. Even if oil prices retreat as tensions ease, they are likely to remain at elevated levels for the rest of the year, adding to inflation uncertainties, said Yu Song, chief China economist at UBS Securities in a commentary. On Thursday, Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500 dropped 0.6 per cent in its fourth straight loss. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.6 per cent, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite fell 0.7 per cent. Investors are also monitoring the U.S.’s consumer price index data for August set to be released Friday ahead of the Federal Reserve’s meeting next week. Also on Thursday, the U.S. producer price index report for August was up 5.4 per cent year-on-year, accelerating from July’s 4.8 per cent. The bond market has been volatile with U.S. Treasury yields well above pre-war levels, fueled by higher energy prices and inflationary pressures as well as rising U.S. government debt. The yield on the 10-year Treasury was at around 4.94 per cent early Friday, up from 4.83 per cent on Wednesday. In other dealings, the U.S. dollar fell to 154.18 Japanese yen from 154.42 yen. The euro was trading at $1.1609, down from $1.1612. ___ Chan Ho-him, The Associated Press AP Business Writers Stan Choe and Anne D’Innocenzio contributed to this report.
