Key Asian markets lost ground, today, after Wall Street finished sharply lower overnight on the back of a further oil price declines, while a worse-than-expected machinery orders report from Japan accelerated the market's slide. So Japan's Nikkei-225 index and Hong Kong's Hang Seng index dropped 0.9 percent, each; South Korea's Kospi index declined 1.5 percent; Singapore's Straits Times index shed 0.2 percent; and China's Shanghai Composite index slipped 0.5 percent. In economic news, Japan's core machinery orders, a leading indicator of capital spending, snapped a four-month rising streak in October. Core machinery orders fell 6.4%, month-on-month, whiel year-on-year machinery orders fell 4.9% in October. In the European markets, London's FTSE-100 and France's CAC-40 were flat, while Germany's DAX had climbed 0.7 percent in intra-day trade. The European Central Bank today issues a second round of long-term loans to the region's banks, with investors weighing the take-up for cues on the central bank's policy decisions. In Germany, latest data showed that consumer price inflation in the Europe's biggest economy remained unchanged last month, compared to October.