Oil prices stay above $108 and Asian shares decline, tracking Wall Street losses

HONG KONG -- Asian shares declined Friday tracking Wall Street losses, while oil prices gained with Brent crude trading above $108 a barrel in its highest since May.

U.S. futures edged higher.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped 2.8% to 63,442.30. Shares of multinational investment holding firm SoftBank Group, an investor of OpenAI, fell 4.1%.

South Korea’s Kospi lost 2.3% to 6,872.39. Samsung Electronics slid 3.9%, while memory chipmaker SK Hynix declined 3.6%.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dipped 0.8% to 24,753.54. The Shanghai Composite index was down 1.8% to 3,862.73. Shares of Chinese AI chipmaker Enflame surged around 180% in its trading debut in Shanghai.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 fell 1.2% to 8,712.20.

Taiwan’s Taiex lost 1.7%, while India’s Sensex declined 1%.

Oil prices continued to gain early Friday as tensions between the U.S. and Iran intensified. Brent crude, the international standard, was 0.9% higher at $108.59 per barrel. It was approximately $72 a barrel in late February, before the start of the war.

Benchmark U.S. crude was up 0.7% to $103.22 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.

On Thursday, Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500 dropped 0.6% in its fourth straight loss. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.6%, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite fell 0.7%.

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% year-on-year, accelerating from July’s 4.8%.

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 rose to 4.96% early Friday from 4.83% on Wednesday.

In other dealings, the U.S. dollar fell to 154.35 Japanese yen from 154.42 yen. The euro was trading at $1.1605, down from $1.1612.

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AP Business Writers Stan Choe and Anne D’Innocenzio contributed to this report.