A series of bad news, including new record levels of oil prices pulled down significantly share prices of Wall Street yesterday. Dow Jones index lost nearly 360 points, closing at its lowest level in almost two years.

The price of oil exceeded 140 dollars a barrel after the chairman of OPEK predicted that the price of the black gold could significantly overleap 150 dollars a barrel this year and after Libya announced that it would reduce its production.

Dow Jones index fell by 358.41 points, or by more than 3%, closing at 11 453.42 points. This was also the lowest closing level since September 11, 2006.

The index of blue chips is currently at 19% below their record closing value of 4 164.53 points from last October.

The broader market indexes also registered losses yesterday. The index Standard & Poor's 500 fell by 38.82 points, or about 3% to 1 283.15 points, while the technological NASDAQ lost 79.89 points, or 3.3% to 2 321.37 points.

Dow and S & P, which is 18% below its record levels from the last fall, are already approaching the continuous decline of 20%.

The price of crude oil yesterday reached 140.39 dollars a barrel and settled at the end of the session at the record 139.64 a barrel on the New York Stock Exchange (NYMEX).

All bad news yesterday obscured the report of the National Association of real estate dealers that sales of existing homes had risen by 2% in May, which is the second increase for the last 10 months.

The biggest fear of Wall Street is that rising prices and fears about their finances will compel Americans to reduce their costs, which will strengthen the economic downturn.

These fears were supported by recent data about GDP of the country. The U.S. economy grew by 1% on an annual basis in the first quarter, the Commerce Department reported yesterday. This is a slight improvement compared to prior forecasts, but still is insufficient.

The prices of government bonds rose sharply. The profitability of the 10 years government bonds fell to 4.03%, compared to 4.10% on Wednesday.

In a separate report, the Ministry of Labor announced yesterday that the initial number of unemployment aids applications remained unchanged to 384 000 last week. However, Wall Street was expecting a slight decrease.

The number of losing shares yesterday exceeded the winning in a ration of 6 to 1 on the New York Stock Exchange, while the traded volume reached 5.11 billion shares.

Russell 2000 index of the smaller companies fell by 2.5% to 698.42 points.

In the rest of the world the Japanese basic index Nikkei lost 0.05%, the British FTSE 100 - 2.6%, while the German DAX and the French CAC-40 fell by 2.4%.