LON­DON-Eu­ro­pean stock mar­kets failed to hold on to their ear­ly gains yes­ter­day as in­vestors fret­ted about Spain's debt prob­lems, and re­duced their po­ten­tial ex­po­sure to up­com­ing US jobs fig­ures in the run-up to the long East­er week­end. An unin­spir­ing open in the US did lit­tle to shake off the pre-hol­i­day malaise. A dis­ap­point­ing set of Span­ish bond auc­tions yes­ter­day con­tributed to a big rout on glob­al stock mar­kets along­side wan­ing ex­pec­ta­tions of an­oth­er mon­e­tary stim­u­lus from the US Fed­er­al Re­serve. Spain has be­come the lat­est point of con­cern in Eu­rope's debt cri­sis as in­vestors are con­cerned over the abil­i­ty of the gov­ern­ment to push through its big aus­ter­i­ty pro­gram meat a time when its econ­o­my is head­ing for a re­turn to re­ces­sion and un­em­ploy­ment is stand­ing at around 23 per cent. The yield on the coun­try's ten-year bond pushed up to 5.74 per cent, a sign that in­vestors are wary of Spain's abil­i­ty to avoid suf­fer­ing the same bailout fate as Greece, Ire­land and Por­tu­gal.

"The eu­ro­zone cri­sis re­mains un­re­solved and Spain re­mains in the spot­light with bond yields mov­ing high­er af­ter yes­ter­day's dis­ap­point­ing bond auc­tion," said Neil MacK­in­non, glob­al macro strate­gist at VTB Cap­i­tal. In­vestors in Eu­rope al­so have cru­cial US jobs da­ta to­day on their minds. Though much of Eu­rope is off for Good Fri­day, US mar­kets are open and the cen­tre­piece dur­ing the ses­sion will be the month­ly non-farm pay­rolls fig­ures for March. Giv­en that the pay­rolls da­ta of­ten set the mar­ket tone for a week or two af­ter their re­lease, in­vestors are rein­ing in their ex­po­sure.

In Eu­rope, the FTSE 100 in­dex of lead­ing British shares closed up slight­ly at 5,723 while Ger­many's DAX fell 0.13 per cent to 6,775. The CAC-40 in France was up 0.19 per cent high­er at 3,319. In the cur­rent risk-averse trad­ing en­vi­ron­ment, the eu­ro took a fur­ther knock, trad­ing 0.6 per cent low­er at US$1.3060. The Stan­dard & Poor's 500 end­ed a short­ened trad­ing week down 0.7 per cent. That's the biggest fall for the in­dex this year and the worst since the week end­ed De­cem­ber 16, 2011.

Stock trad­ing will be closed for the Good Fri­day hol­i­day.

In­vestors sold stocks on fears that Spain may have trou­ble pay­ing back its debt. On Thurs­day, the in­ter­est rate on a key Span­ish gov­ern­ment bond rose to its high­est since No­vem­ber. The S&P 500 fell less than one point to 1,398. The Dow Jones in­dus­tri­al av­er­age fell 15 points to 13,060. The Nas­daq rose 12 points to 3,080. More stocks fell than rose on the New York Stock Ex­change. Vol­ume was light at 3.3 bil­lion shares. Ear­li­er in Asia, Japan's Nikkei 225 in­dex slipped 0.5 per cent to close at 9,767.61 while Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell 1 per cent to 20,593. In main­land Chi­na, the mood was some­what dif­fer­ent, with the Shang­hai Com­pos­ite In­dex up 1.7 per cent at 2,302.24 and the small­er Shen­zhen Com­pos­ite In­dex clos­ing 3.1 per cent high­er to 919.42. Oil prices re­cov­ered though af­ter a re­cent steady de­cline over re­cent days as in­vestors have wor­ried about the glob­al eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery and a jump in US crude sup­plies-bench­mark oil for May de­liv­ery was up US$1.26 cents to US$102.73 per bar­rel in elec­tron­ic trad­ing on the New York Mer­can­tile Ex­change.

The con­tract fell US$2.54 to fin­ish at US$101.47 a bar­rel in New York on Wednes­day. It had not closed be­low US$102 per bar­rel since Feb­ru­ary 15. (AP)