Asian stocks rise after Wall Street loss

BEIJING - Chinese stocks declined Thursday after a survey showed manufacturing weakening while most other Asian markets gained after Wall Street fell for a second day.

KEEPING SCORE: The Shanghai Composite Index lost 0.5 per cent to 3,101.37 while Tokyo's Nikkei 225 gained 1.1 per cent to 19,867.93. Hong Kong's Hang Seng advanced 0.3 per cent to 25,749.34 and Seoul's Kospi shed 0.1 per cent to 2,344.14. Sydney's S&P-ASX 200 was little-changed at 5,730.90 and India's Sensex also was unchanged at 31,164.38. Benchmarks in New Zealand, Taiwan and Southeast Asia advanced.

WALL STREET: U.S. stocks fell on a sharp drop for banks and a rare loss for tech companies. That offset gains for drug makers and consumer-focused companies. Banks fell after executives from JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America said their trading businesses are having a rough second quarter. Energy companies fell with oil prices. Investors picked consumer-focused companies, drug makers and high-dividend utilities and household goods companies. The Standard & Poor's 500 index lost less than 0.1 per cent to 2,411.80. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 0.1 per cent to 21,008.65.

CHINESE MANUFACTURING: The Chinese business magazine Caixin said its purchasing managers' index declined for a third month, falling to 49.6 from April's 50.3 on a 100-point scale on which numbers below 50 show activity contracting. That came after a separate PMI on Wednesday by the National Bureau of Statistics and an industry group, the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing, improved to 54.5 from 54. "Yesterday's official PMI reading had hinted at growth having remained broadly stable last month," said Julian Evans-Pritchard of Capital Economics in a report. "But today's downbeat unofficial PMI suggests conditions may not have held up as well as previously thought."

TRUMP AND CLIMATE: U.S. President Donald Trump was preparing to announce whether he will pull the United States out of the 150-nation Paris climate accord. Trump promoted his announcement Wednesday night on Twitter, after a day in which U.S. allies around the world sounded alarms about the likely consequences of a U.S. withdrawal. Trump said he still was listening to "a lot of people both ways." Abandoning the pact would isolate the U.S. from allies who spent years negotiating the 2015 agreement to fight global warming by reducing carbon emissions.

ENERGY: Benchmark U.S. oil gained 48 cents to $48.80 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract plunged $1.34 on Wednesday to close at $48.32. Brent crude, used to price international oils, advanced 45 cents to $51.21 in London. It dropped $1.48 the previous session.

CURRENCY: The dollar gained to 110.95 yen from Wednesday's 110.76. The euro edged down to $1.1246 from $1.1247.

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