LONDON — Oil prices fell to near $71 a barrel today, extending last week's losses amid fears U.S. job gains are slowing and the European debt crisis might be spreading.

Benchmark crude for July delivery was down 20 cents to $71.31 a barrel at late morning European time after falling to as low as $69.51 earlier in the session in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract lost $3.10 to settle at $71.51 on Friday.

Oil traders often look to stock markets as a gauge of overall investor sentiment, and most Asian and European indexes plummeted today, extending a rout that began Friday with a 3.2 percent drop in the Dow Jones industrial average.

Weak U.S. employment data for May and comments from a Hungarian official saying his country could be hit by a Greece-like fiscal crisis have undermined confidence in global economic growth and oil demand.

"Investors are fleeing riskier assets, so they're dumping stocks and oil," said Victor Shum, an energy analyst at consultancy Purvin & Gertz in Singapore. "The market may be overreacting a bit, but the jobs report shows that the U.S. economy is still struggling."

Some analysts point to falling U.S. crude inventories as a sign of improving crude demand and expect prices to rebound later this year.

"The shift in the market's view of forward fundamentals has been too extreme," Goldman Sachs said in a report. "We continue to expect crude oil prices to move into an $85 to $95 trading range in the second half."