Europe midday: Stocks pare early losses

Stocks on the Continent are holding lower but have come off their earlier lows with reports of more Covid-19 infections having been detected in the People's Republic of China weighing on investor sentiment.

Investors are also keeping close tabs on the newsflow around the Nordstream 1 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany which was to be taken off-line for maintenance for 10 days starting from Monday.

Fears were that it would not be brought back on line and according to economists at Citi that would be enough to tip the euro area from stagnation into a "(mild) recession".

As of 1318 BST, the Stoxx 600 was trading 0.40% lower at 415.44, alongside a 0.62% drop for France´s Cac-40 to 5,995.65, while Germany's Dax was 0.84% lower to 12,906.57.

Risk aversion meanwhile kept feeding into US dollar strength with the euro moving lower by 0.93% to 1.0090 versus the Greenback.

In parallel, front-dated Brent crude oil futures were falling 2.28% to $104.74 a barrel on the ICE.

Ten-year euro area periphery government bond yields were well behaved, drifting slightly lower.

On a related note, analysts at Barclays said that Purchasing Managers' Indices had slowed and "reconnected" with surging yields.

"If growth continues to slow from here, it could cap yields near current levels," they added.

"Expensive factors like Growth's valuation adjustment may well be nearly over then. On the opposite side, Value's more cyclical earnings may be at risk. We take profit on OW Value/UW Growth."

Later in the day, Euro area finance ministers were due to meet in Brussels.

There was little in terms of fresh economic data on Monday, although ISTAT did report a 1.9% month-on-month jump in Italian retail sales during the month of May.

At the weekend, European Central Bank governing council member, Robert Holzmann, argued in a newspaper interview in favour of as much as 125 basis points of interest rate hikes by September if the inflation outlook did not improve.

His peer on the council, Greece's Yannis Stournaras meanwhile told Bloomberg on Saturday that a "very good debate" was ongoing as regarded the ECB's future anti-fragmentation tool.

Stournaras further said he hoped that the tool would surprise markets "on the positive side".