LONDON (AP) -- European stocks finished lower Tuesday, and despite a strong performance across Asia, some markets there fell into the red as investors remained gloomy following last week's terror attacks in the United States.
Oil and gold both retreated, and the U.S. dollar was mostly lower against other major currencies.
Stocks declined on all major European markets in spite of interest rate cuts by central banks around the world, including a 0.25 percentage point cut by the Bank of England at midday.
"The rate cut, at least in Europe, doesn't seem to have calmed nerves at all," said Jennifer Guest-Cagirtekin, a European stock strategist at the London brokerage Gerrard. "There's not an awful lot of positive things you can hang onto."
Reports that Afghanistan was preparing for war against the United States sparked selling in many financial centers.
Investors appeared mostly unmoved by a series of confidence-building cuts in key interest rates that began Monday with the Federal Reserve's half-point reduction.
The European Central Bank followed with a similar cut, and the Bank of Japan dropped a key rate earlier Tuesday.
Leading British, French and German stock exchanges all rebounded slightly from earlier lows once Wall Street showed signs of stabilizing after Monday's plunge in U.S. shares.
The FTSE 100 index of British blue chips closed down 1.04 percent, or 50.20, at 4,848.70. The index had wallowed as much as 2.59 percent below Monday's close.
The CAC 40 index of leading French shares bottomed out at 2.06 percent beneath Monday's close before rising slightly to finish the day down 1.13 percent at 3,970.18.
The Xetra DAX index on Germany's Deutsche Boerse was 0.85 percent lower at 4,198.60 in evening trading in Frankfurt, after trading down as much as 2.66 percent earlier in the day.
In contrast to Monday's dismal results, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 6.02 at 8,926.72 in midday trading. The Nasdaq composite index advanced 2.90 to 1,582.45, and the Standard & Poor's 500 index inched up 1.23 to 1,040.00.
The Dow dropped 7.1 percent Monday in its biggest-ever point loss, while the Nasdaq tumbled 6.8 percent.
In Asia, Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index finished with a loss of 0.1 percent.
In Tokyo, blue chips moved higher from the outset -- with the interest rate cuts in the United States and Europe also lifting sentiment.
The 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average finished up 175.47 points, or 1.9 percent, at 9,679.88.
"I don't think we have seen the last of the falls either in Tokyo or elsewhere, so it is a very much nervous situation just waiting to crumble at any further bad news," said Noriko Hama, chief economist at Mitsubishi Research Institute in Tokyo.
Jitters hit the Tokyo market after a bomb threat prompted the evacuation of a downtown office building housing Citibank, J.P. Morgan and Nikko Salomon Smith Barney.
