European Markets Down 1.3% Monday After Asia Selloff

European markets were uniformly down Monday morning on the heels of a substantial drop in Asia (Asian Markets Drop Sharply Monday).

London's FTSE 100 was down 1.25% as of 6:25 ET. Home Retail dropped almost 6%. Prudential (PRU) was off 3.3%. Miners BHP Billiton (BHP -2.65%), Anglo American (AAUK -2.7%) and Rio Tinto (RTP -2.1%) were heavy losers.

The CAC 40 was off 1.29%. Big losers included Alcatel-Lucent (ALU -4.8%) and AXA (AXA -2.5%).

The Dax fell 1.39%. Infineon (IFX) fell 3.5%, Siemens (SI) was off 1.7% and Deutsche Bank (DB) slipped 1.5%.

"It looks like the Christmas rally that we were hoping for is not going to materialize," City Index Markets chief strategist Tom Hougaard said. "There is a lot more selling pressure in the U.S. than I had thought. I don't think the UK stock market wants to sell off but I don't think it has much of a choice. The Dow fell out of bed (Friday) and Asia really took it on the chin overnight... If we had not seen such a weak Asian market, we would have been OK."

Sources: Reuters
Additional Reading: Asian Markets Drop Sharply Monday

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