UK stocks : FTSE 100 drops 0.5 pct
Britain's top shares fell on Monday on concern about prospects for global growth, with a murky outlook for metal demand from top consumer China shunting miners to the top of the fallers' list.
The FTSE 100 closed down 32.97 points, or 0.5 percent, at 6,345.63, albeit still within sight of a five-year peak of 6,412.44 struck on Feb. 20, with the mining sector off 2.6 percent - trading around three-month lows.
Sentiment in the mining sector, already dented on Friday by poor Chinese manufacturing data, was exacerbated by worries over Beijing tightening its grip on the property sector - which has the potential to stunt the country's demand for raw materials.
Kazakhmys led the market lower, continuing a slide seen since Thursday when it warned of sharply higher costs.
Its shares sank 5.9 percent as Deutsche Bank became the latest investment bank to weigh in on the copper miner, cutting its target price to 650 pence.
Anglo American, meanwhile, shed 2.7 percent as Nomura cut its rating on the firm to "reduce" citing valuation grounds and viewing consensus earnings as too high for 2013.
Banks suffered too, with heavyweight HSBC off 2.5 percent, alone accounting for 13.1 points of the FTSE 100's drop, after it posted a pretax profit of $20.6 billion for last year, missing analyst expectations.
Also hurting broad market sentiment were concerns about U.S. budget cuts - known as the "sequester" - which threaten to curb growth in the world's biggest economy, and over political instability following Italian elections, which has fuelled
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