Europe: Investors pulled back

European investors pulled back from the stock market Monday after a weekend, which showed that Germany and France still does not quite agree to how the crisis should be handled. While France wants as quickly as possible a launch of a joint bank union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel does not want to set a time for it.

The weekend's news flow from the euro zone pointed to a difficult Monday for riskier assets.

The British stock market closed 0.2 percent lower, while the downturn in Germany and France was made up to 0.5 and 1.0 percent measured by the benchmark stock indexes. Especially the cyclical stocks had a hard time on Monday, when a decline in the German Ifo Business Climate Index surprisingly showed that German companies have a less positive view of both the current business climate in the country as the business climate in the long term.

Now that the ECB has announced that it will buy government bonds from the debt-ridden, southern European countries and the U.S. Federal Reserve, has launched the third round of bond purchases, the focus returned to economic data, preferably showing signs of improvement. It seems investors are waiting for such a recovery before sending stocks, which have already risen sharply further up.

Among commodity shares Anglo American fell 3.2 percent - Burdened by new analyzes from Bank of America and Citigroup, both of which have lowered their recommendation for the mining company's stock to "neutral" from "buy". Rio Tinto, which was also lowered to "neutral" from "buy" by Citigroup, declined by 2.1 percent.

By contrast, Air France-KLM rose by 2.8 percent. The Irish edition of the Sunday Times reported Sunday that Air France-KLM has allegedly hired Key Capital to sell CityJet.