Asian Markets See Decline as Key Indexes Fall

There were gloomy faces on Asia's leading stock exchanges after a couple of hours of trading on Thursday. Both Tokyo's important Nikkei 225 index and the broader Topix index had fallen by lunchtime, with 0.9 and 0.7 percent respectively.

Even Hong Kong's Hang Seng index had fallen by 0.8. Shanghai's composite index was down 0.3 percent, while Shenzhen's composite index was at minus 0.8.