Wall Street Opens Week With Losses

Cardillo further pointed out that the jump in oil was acting as a further drag on the market, and Roberts remarked that the development was "really the key" today. Last week's equities rally, he pointed out, was accompanied by a slide in oil prices.

Crude futures hit a record high of $120.36 earlier, before paring back to a $3.65 gain at $119.97 a barrel. Gold advanced $16.10 to $874.10 an ounce. At the same time, the U.S. dollar yielded 0.6% to the euro at $1.5506 and sank 0.2% against the yen.

The inflation of crude prices, believes Roberts, is demand-driven, and he said that -- barring a "major exogenous supply interruption, not just short-term disruptions" -- it will remain that way. So, eventually, he predicted, a ceiling will be placed on gas prices as people begin to pare back on their gas usage and look to new alternatives. He noted, however, that such changes will probably take awhile to materialize on a grand scale.

As for the M&A news on the corporate front, over the weekend Microsoft announced it had thrown in the towel on its months-long efforts to take out Yahoo!. The software maker said it was willing to sweeten its offer by some $5 billion, to $33 a share, but claimed Yahoo! wanted at least $5 billion more than that.

Regarding Microsoft's prior threats that it would go hostile if Yahoo! didn't accept its original bid, the company decided against that path, believing that Yahoo! would in that case try to make itself unattractive as a buyout target.