NEW YORK-Oil prices suf­fered their biggest two-day loss in 11 months and stocks dropped yes­ter­day on con­cerns about the strength of glob­al growth and as Gold­man Sachs warned crude was set for a pull­back.The price of crude trad­ed in New York slid more than 3 per cent, bring­ing loss­es since Fri­day to 5.8 per cent. Gold­man Sachs pre­dict­ed Brent prices would fall back to US$105 in "com­ing months," down from US$120 yes­ter­day, and the In­ter­na­tion­al En­er­gy Agency said high prices could be erod­ing de­mand.World stocks, as mea­sured by the MSCI's main world eq­ui­ty in­dex, were down 1.3 per cent, the in­dex's biggest one-day de­cline in four weeks.

Wor­ries over glob­al growth were height­ened af­ter Japan's eco­nom­ic min­is­ter warned that dam­age caused by last month's earth­quake and tsuna­mi could be worse than ini­tial­ly thought for the world's third-largest econ­o­my.Japan's de­ci­sion to put the sever­i­ty of ra­di­a­tion leak­age at its strick­en Fukushi­ma nu­clear plant on a par with the worst nu­clear dis­as­ter, at Cher­nobyl, al­so weighed on sen­ti­ment."The mar­ket is in­creas­ing­ly be­com­ing con­cerned about the sit­u­a­tion in Japan and that high oil prices and high com­mod­i­ty prices will even­tu­al­ly hurt eco­nom­ic growth," said Mark Bron­zo, mon­ey man­ag­er at Se­cu­ri­ty Glob­al In­vestors in Irv­ing­ton, New York.

US stocks end­ed low­er af­ter dis­ap­point­ing rev­enue fig­ures from alu­mini­um mak­er Al­coa Inc, the Dow com­po­nent that marked the start of the quar­ter­ly earn­ings sea­son with its re­lease af­ter the mar­ket close on Mon­day.En­er­gy stocks led loss­es on the bench­mark S&P 500.The S&P en­er­gy in­dex, the mar­ket's top per­former in the first quar­ter, shed 3 per cent."The lead­er­ship has been for the longest time in those sec­tors that are high­ly re­lat­ed to glob­al growth and com­mod­i­ty prices.

"So once the com­mod­i­ty space starts rolling over, then eq­ui­ties are poised to fol­low," said Robert Van Baten­burg, head of eq­ui­ty re­search at Louis Cap­i­tal in New York.The Dow Jones in­dus­tri­al av­er­age dropped 117.53 points, or 0.95 per cent, to end at 12,263.58. The Stan­dard & Poor's 500 In­dex dropped 10.30 points, or 0.78 per cent, to 1,314.16. The Nas­daq Com­pos­ite In­dex dropped 26.72 points, or 0.96 per cent, to 2,744.79.

The FT­SEu­rofirst 300 in­dex of top Eu­ro­pean shares slipped 1.7 per cent, with min­ers and en­er­gy firms among the heav­i­est losers.Emerg­ing mar­kets, which count sev­er­al re­source ex­porters in their ranks, fell 1.9 per cent.Brent crude oil fell US$3.06 to set­tle at US$120.92 a bar­rel.The May Brent con­tract ex­pires on Thurs­day.US May crude fell US$3.67 to set­tle at US$106.25. (Reuters)