Oil prices fall to $104 and world shares are mixed following Wall Street losses

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HONG KONG (AP) — World shares were mixed Friday following Wall Street losses, while oil prices fell with Brent crude trading at around $104 a barrel after hitting its highest level since May.

U.S. futures edged higher.

In early European trading, Britain's FTSE 100 rose 0.5% to 10,656.44 after official data showed that Britain's economy in July grew faster than what economists had expected. Germany's DAX gained 0.6% to 25,514.37, while France's CAC 40 climbed 0.6% to 8,161.31.

Markets most declined in Asia. Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped 1.9% to 64,011.34. Shares of multinational investment holding firm SoftBank Group, an investor of OpenAI, fell almost 4%.

South Korea’s Kospi lost 1.8% to 6,909.91. Samsung Electronics slid 3.5%, while memory chipmaker SK Hynix declined 2.2%.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dipped 0.6% to 24,805.63. The Shanghai Composite index was down 1.2% to 3,888.11. Shares of Chinese AI chipmaker Enflame surged 179% in its trading debut in Shanghai.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 fell 0.9% to 8,741.20.

Taiwan’s Taiex lost 1.6%, while India’s Sensex edged up less than 0.1%.

Oil prices fell Friday after climbing earlier, as tensions between the U.S. and Iran intensified. Brent crude, the international standard, was 3.3% lower at $104.09 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 2.8% to below $100 per barrel, trading at $99.63.

That comes as U.S. diesel prices on Friday soared past $6 gallon on average and set another record.

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% 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 was at around 4.94% early Friday, up from 4.83% on Wednesday.

In other dealings, the U.S. dollar fell to 154.11 Japanese yen from 154.42 yen. The euro was trading at $1.1596, down from $1.1612.