Asia stocks brush off Wall Street slide after Trump's comments

Asian stocks and the dollar edged up on Thursday, shaking off the risk aversion that gripped financial markets overnight after President Donald Trump threatened to shut down the U.S. government and end the North American Free Trade Agreement. 

Financial spreadbetters expect Britain's FTSE 100 .FTSE, Germany's DAX .GDAXI and France's CAC 40 .FCHIto open marginally higher. 

MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS rose 0.45 percent.

Japan's Nikkei .N225 pulled back 0.3 percent, with steelmakers slumping after the Nikkei business daily reported that Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) was looking to cut the price of steel supplied to component makers in the October-March period. 

That is the result of lower rates, agreed for the six months through September with steelmakers such as Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp.Three of the five biggest decliners on the index were steelmakers. 

Chinese blue chips .CSI300 were down about 0.3 percent, shrugging off a 23 percent jump in profits for Chinese state-owned firms in the first seven months of 2017 from a year earlier.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng .HSI climbed 0.5 percent. 

South Korea's KOSPI .KS11 added 0.4 percent and Australian stocks gained almost 0.1 percent.

Overnight, U.S. stock indexes closed between 0.3 percent .IXIC .SPX and 0.4 percent .DJI lower. 

Trump said at a Tuesday night rally in Arizona that he would be willing to risk a government shutdown to secure funding for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Those comments came ahead of a late-September deadline to raise the U.S. debt ceiling or risk defaulting on debt payments