US stocks fell sharply Monday amid lingering worries about debt problems in the eurozone, sending the Dow Jones industrials to a close below 10,000 for the first time since November.
The blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average slumped 104.14 points (1.04 percent) to 9,908.09 at the closing bell, as a late-day selloff accelerated in the final hour.
The Nasdaq composite shed 15.28 points (0.71 percent) to 2,125.84 and the broad-market Standard & Poor's 500 index lost 9.43 points (0.88 percent) to a preliminary close of 1,056.76.
News that makes sense
Your trusted source for staying up-to-date with the world around you. Get free daily news updates and analysis, straight to your inbox.
Spain seeks to reassure wary investors
Meanwhile, debt-hit Spain strived to reassure investors that the recession-mired country was tackling its public spending deficit as it rejected any comparison to Greece's fiscal troubles.
Jose Manuel Campa, the secretary of state for the economy, said the deficit was mostly a result of the global financial crisis and only a small part was a structural problem.
"We are right in the middle of an important economic crisis, and this creates a deficit that in part has structural reasons, but a majority of it is cyclical," he told AFP.
Campa visited London on Monday and was scheduled to travel to Paris on Tuesday to convince investors that Spain is not heading toward the same deep deficit and debt troubles as Greece.
Greece has proposed an austerity budget aimed at slashing a soaring deficit that has unnerved investors and caused the euro to fall against the dollar.
Fears of contagion to other eurozone members with budget troubles, including Spain, Portugal and Ireland, caused European stock markets to plunge last week.
Athens has been placed under unprecedented surveillance by the European Union to ensure it follows through on its budget-cutting programme.
Campa noted that Spain's socialist government has proposed a tax hike, a higher retirement age and a 50-billion-euro austerity programme aimed at cutting the deficit from 11.4 percent of output to the EU limit of 3.0 percent by 2013.
"Spain is taking measures to tackle the structural part of this deficit," Campa said. "There are parts of the public spending that we clearly have to reduce: payrolls, spending in infrastructure."
