European stocks declined

European stocks declined for a third day as concern U.S. lawmakers won’t agree on a budget before the holiday offset the election in Japan of a party that backs more economic stimulus. U.S. futures and Asian shares were little changed.

U.S. lawmakers continue to discuss a budget deal to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, the more than $600 billion in automatic tax increases and spending cuts due to take effect next year.

Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party reclaimed power three years after surrendering half a century of control. The victory of Shinzo Abe’s party gives him a mandate to implement fiscal and monetary stimulus plans.

KPN slumped 12 percent to 4.08 euros, its biggest decline in more than four years. The company cut its dividend as it spent 1.35 billion euros to buy frequencies for faster mobile networks. KPN said Dec. 14 that it won’t pay a final dividend for 2012, after its 12-cent interim dividend, and that next year’s payout will be 3 cents a share. That compares with a previous plan to pay 35 cents a share for this year and at least the same amount for 2013.

UBS lost 1.3 percent to 14.85 Swiss francs. The Zurich- based bank is set to pay as much as $1.6 billion to settle claims of Libor manipulation by the U.S. Justice Department, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.K. Financial Services Authority and the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, said a person familiar with the probes.

PSA Peugeot Citroen, which rallied 16 percent for the biggest gain on the Stoxx 600 last week, gained 2.1 percent to 5.37 euros as the carmaker said it is close to finalizing a deal with a pool of banks to refinance debt at its banking unit.

FTSE 100 5,884.6 -37.16 -0.63%

CAC 40 3,618.84 -24.44 -0.67%

DAX 7,576.91 -19.56 -0.26%