31 May - Spain's main stock market index recorded its biggest monthly fall in eight months in May, after closing Wednesday with a third consecutive daily drop with almost all its stocks in the red, in a context of anxiety over US debt and interest rates, despite good inflation data in the eurozone.

Although the fall in German inflation to its lowest level in more than a year encouraged some optimism in Europe, pessimism over the difficult parliamentary procedure on the US debt ceiling was felt more strongly during the session, pushing most of the world's stock markets lower.

"All indications are that the (debt ceiling) deal will close, but there are headlines about some congressmen being against it," said Joe Saluzzi, co-manager of trading at Themis Trading. "Until that deal closes, there will be some nervousness."

This was compounded by the unexpected rise in U.S. job openings in April, which could force the Fed to raise rates again at its next meeting on June 13-14.

All this only adds to doubts about the global economy's ability to weather a deep slump, after news emerged in the morning that industrial activity in China contracted faster than expected in May on weak demand.

"If the market was expecting China to come to the rescue, I think, on this occasion, it's wrong," said Michael Hewson, strategist at CMC Markets. "COVID has done a lot of structural damage to the Chinese economy."

As it was, Spain's Ibex-35 closed down 117.30 points on Wednesday, down 1.28%, to 9,050.20 points.

For the month as a whole, the Ibex-35 accumulated a loss of 2.06%, its biggest monthly decline since September 2022.

The FTSE Eurofirst 300 index of large European stocks lost 1.13%.

In the banking sector, Santander lost 2.11%, BBVA fell 3.74%, Caixabank gave up 3.08%, Sabadell fell 3.79%, Bankinter dropped 2.34% and Unicaja Banco lost 2.94%.

Among the large non-financial stocks, Telefónica gained 1.40%, Inditex fell 0.51%, Iberdrola dropped 0.83%, Cellnex gained 0.61%, and the oil company Repsol lost 1.36%.

With most of the stocks in the index in the red, Laboratorios Rovi fell sharply, extending Tuesday's slight decline and dropping 6.73%, after having accumulated an advance of 5.15% in the previous seven sessions.

In the whole year, Rovi accumulates an advance of 14.6%.

(Reporting by Dario Fernandez; additional information by Shreyashi Sanyal and Amanda Cooper)