Stock markets in Europe and Asia declined, today, and only monthly U.S. non-farm payrolls numbers stood in the way of shares globally racking up their biggest falls since mid-February. Concerns over growth, the failure of extraordinary central bank stimulus and banking profitability in an era of negative interest rates, along with a still tepid recovery in oil prices kept a lid on any optimism. Money markets show investors have all but abandoned betting that U.S. and global growth will be strong enough to swallow further rises in official U.S. interest rates this year. So Japan's Nikkei 225 index lost 0.3 percent; Hong Kong's Hang Seng index dropped 1.7 percent; Singapore's Straits Times index slipped 1.3 percent; and China's Shanghai Composite index slumped 2.8 percent. The South Korean markets remained closed for a holiday.In the European markets, the UK's FTSE-100 had lost 0.8 percent, France's CAC-40 had declined one percent and Germany's DAX had dropped 0.7 percent in intra-day trade.