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

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

HONG KONG (AP) - 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.

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