The prices of oil, gold and other commodities continued to plummet around the world on Thursday, a retreat from a months-long price run-up that may offer consumers a reprieve from inflation.

In less than 36 hours, crude oil and gold have fallen almost 10 percent from their Tuesday highs. Gold, which recently crossed the $1,000 mark, slid to nearly $900 a troy ounce in overnight trading. Futures contracts for crude oil were trading below $100 for the first time in more than two weeks.

Wheat, sugar, corn, copper, and platinum all fell as well. “These are all significant declines,” said James Steel, a commodities analyst at HSBC.

On Wall Street, stocks opened higher, with the Dow Jones industrial average up more than 100 points. The gains followed a dreary night overseas, with benchmark indexes in Hong Kong and Sydney tumbling more than 3 percent, though Tokyos Nikkei index showed a strong gain.

By late afternoon in Europe, markets in Frankfurt, London, and Paris were all down more than 0.6 percent.

The precipitous drop in commodity prices began Wednesday morning, hours after the Federal Reserve lowered benchmark interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point.

Many investors had expected the Fed to cut by a full percentage point, which would have sent down the value of the dollar. For months, with the dollar in free fall, investors have plowed their funds into commodities, which are likely to go up as the dollar falls.

But the Feds less aggressive move sent the dollar up, and it has since extended its gains against the euro and the yen. The European currency fell more than 1 percent on Thursday to $1.5429.

As a result, investors scrambled to get out of their bets on commodities. “The precious metals markets and all commodity markets had built in a higher cut,” Steel said.

In late-morning trading on Thursday, oil was hovering just above $100 a barrel, a high price by historical standards but down sharply since the beginning of the week. Retail gasoline prices in the United States, which had been setting records earlier in the month, have been dropping since Sunday, falling to a nationwide average for unleaded regular of about $3.28 a gallon. Diesel, however, is still rising and set a new record overnight of $4.03 a gallon.

The June contract for gold was trading around $925 a troy ounce in New York trading on Thursday morning, down more than 8 percent from its $1,008.80 closing price on Tuesday, as demand for the precious metal appeared to drop in some regions. “We had a battery of data showing a real erosion in jewelry demand in India and China,” said James Steel, a commodities analyst at HSBC.

Indeed, though some analysts said the flight from commodities suggests a less risky outlook Д raw materials can be used as a safe haven in difficult economic times Д others said the price declines indicate worries about demand.

Some investors say they are worried that the credit crisis is going to take a severe toll on the United States economy, hurting the markets confidence that producers will escape the worst effects of a slowdown.

Ben Dell, an oil analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein Company, said he was concerned that global demand for crude oil will fall this year. “If gross domestic product comes in weak,” he said, “theres a lot of room for a correction.”

But Paul Horsnell, a commodities analyst at Barclays Capital in London, played down the notion that sudden fears of a recession in the United States or anywhere else had triggered the recent slide in commodities prices. “If you get the kind of market turbulence you have had this week, you have knock-on effects in commodities,” he said.

Horsnell said that some estimates indicate that the world will use more crude oil than it did last year. That is sure to fortify arguments that the commodities boom, as much as before, is being driven by greater demand from China, India and other emerging economies.

Oil prices, he noted, are still at levels evoking the oil shocks of the 1970s. “We see headlines, Oil collapses to $102, ” he said. “Is that really a collapse?”

Carter Dougherty and Tim Johnston contributed reporting.

FRANKFURT: European central banks injected piles of fresh cash into the financial system Thursday in an attempt to get nervous banks through the Easter holiday weekend.

On top of adding more liquidity, the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, brought Britains top bankers into a closed-door session to discuss ways to restore “more orderly” market conditions.

The Bank of England described the meeting as routine, but it was only called last week - and comes a day after the central bank took the unusual step of publicly slapping down rumors of a brewing disaster among British banks.

That came in the wake of the collapse of Bear Stearns in the United States, the latest victim of the credit crunch that began last summer.

But the crisis showed no sign of ending Thursday. Europes first major victim, IKB Deutsche Industriebank, on Thursday announced new writeoffs linked to its investments in mortgage-backed securities in the United States, and said it would lose nearly \1 billion this year.

The European Central Bank surprised markets with a \15 billion infusion of extra loans that banks can use to firm up balance sheets over the holiday weekend. It is also a prelude to end-of-quarter accounting, a time when demand for cash typically rises.

The ECB also went through with a $15 billion cash auction, part of previously scheduled currency swap agreement with the U.S. Federal Reserve.

For its part, the Bank of England loaned 5 billion.

Money markets, the short-term lending pool that banks tap for day-to-day operations, have turned especially tight in the last few weeks, with pressures rising to levels not seen since late last year.

The rate for three-month loans among banks rose to 4.67 percent in the euro area, reflecting the extreme caution that has gripped lenders around the world and led to a credit squeeze for the broader economy in the United States but not - so far - in continental Europe.

King, head of the British central bank, met with chief executives from Britains five largest banks - Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB, HSBC, Barclays and HBOS - to discuss whether the British central bank should do more to strengthen lenders financial position.

But in a statement issued afterward, the central bank gave few details about what was discussed.

“The Bank of England and the banks agreed to continue their close dialogue with the objective of restoring more orderly market conditions,” it said.

British banks have long argued that central banks should accept more kinds of securities as collateral for lending, a step that would allow the banks to offload investments of questionable value. The Bank of England has resisted such steps, arguing that central banks, and by extension taxpayers, should not assume the risks that banks willingly incurred.

Taxpayers are on the hook already in Germany, where IKB, the tiny German lender whose near-collapse last summer heralded the beginning of the financial crisis in Europe, warned it would have to write off another \590 million thanks to rapidly deteriorating market conditions.

IKBs principal shareholder, the state-owned banking group KfW, will kick in \450 million from a previously arranged credit line to recapitalize the bank, which has needed repeated bailouts to stay afloat over the last six months. IKB also announced it would post an \800 million loss for the fiscal year ending March 31, and make little or no profit in the coming years.

Dьsseldorf-based IKB speculated heavily in securities linked to the crisis-ridden U.S. mortgage market, to an extent that far outstripped the banks capacity for surviving significant market disruptions.

In mid-February, with KfWs ability to support IKB without harming its other activities increasingly in doubt, the German government stepped with a \1 billion payment to keep the bank afloat. A consortium of private banks, worried about the overall effect on the financial system, also kicked into what was by then the third bailout package.

IKBs troubles have had a political resonance in Germany, where criticism of the packaged hammered out last month was fierce. “There must be no further money from the federal budget,” Steffen Kampeter, budget policy spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkels conservative Christian Democrats, told Reuters on Thursday.

Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, made waves in Germany earlier this week with his call for greater government action to wind down a financial crisis that has gathered momentum in recent weeks. “I no longer believe in the markets self-healing power,” Ackermann said.

He was quickly slapped down by Axel Weber, the president of the German Bundesbank, who said that the burden was on banks to come clean about their bad investments.

The pathologist who concluded that Bob Woolmer was murdered, a verdict formally overturned by the Jamaican police yesterday, has insisted he was right.

“I am sticking to my findings. He was murdered,” the Indian-born pathologist Dr Ere Seshaiah told today’s Jamaica Observer newspaper. “I am confident he was murdered. Woolmer is not a first for me - I have been doing autopsies here since 1995.”

The pathologist found that a broken bone in the Pakistan cricket coach indicated that he had been strangled.

The 58-year-old former England international cricketer was found dead in his hotel room in Kingston in March, setting in motion a chain of fevered speculation about a possible motive.

Woolmer’s Pakistan team had been knocked out of the Cricket World Cup by lowly Ireland the previous day, and a series of theories speculated that the coach had been targeted by match-fixing criminals or even an irate fan.

However, at a press conference yesterday, Lucius Thomas, the head of Jamaica’s police force, announced that Woolmer had died of natural causes and had not been murdered.

Today, the Jamaican police spokesman Karl Angell said heart failure appeared to have been to blame. “Determining the cause of death is the remit of the coroner, but we are 99% sure that Woolmer died of heart failure,” he added.

Although Dr Seshaiah was not specifically criticised by police, at yesterday’s press conference deputy commissioner Mark Shields, the officer who led the investigation, deputy commissioner, repeatedly stressed that the murder investigation had been launched because of his report.