The chatter helped push up Chinese banking shares

Benchmark oil hovered above $96 per barrel while the dollar fell against the euro for moncler jackets and the yen. Hong Kong's Hang Seng posted a 0.5 percent gain at 17,944.72. South Korea's Kospi rose 0.4 percent to 1,790.29 and Australia's S&P/ASX 200 gained marginally to 4,052.30. Benchmarks in Singapore and Taiwan also rose. Japan's Nikkei 225, reopening after a one-day public holiday, fell 1.3 percent to 8,208.47. Shares in India, Malaysia and Indonesia also fell. Speculation that China's central bank was aiming to ease its tight monetary policy helped spur a wave of buying in Hong Kong, analysts said. But the official Xinhua News Agency said Thursday the move _ lowering reserve requirements for six rural banks in eastern Zhejiang _ was administrative rather a policy shift. The banks' reserve requirements had been raised a year earlier after they failed to lend enough to farming moncler businesses. There have been signs that China's campaign of interest rate hikes and credit controls to tame stubbornly high inflation has been working, giving it leeway to ease monetary policy as the world economy stumbles. ``The positive catalyst today is the expectation that the China tightening cycle might loosen,'' said Jackson Wong, vice president at Tanrich Securities in Hong Kong. The chatter helped push up Chinese banking shares. Hong Kong-listed Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. jumped 3.3 percent and Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, the country's biggest commercial lender, rose 1.9 percent. Global markets were spooked Wednesday by the poor results at an auction of German debt, which met with only 60 percent demand. Germany's Financial Agency blamed ``the extraordinarily nervous market environment for moncler jackets for women.''