Europe midday: Stocks stage small bounce on hopes for reopening of US economy

Stocks across the Continent are holding onto small gains, helped by reports that the White House may soon outline plans to gradually re-open the American economy.

Yet investors were also waiting on US jobs data due out later in the session that as Michael Hewson at CMC Markets UK put it, were expected to show that all of the country's employment gains of the last 11 years had been wiped out in just four weeks.

Against that backdrop, as of 1315 GMT the benchmark Stoxx 600 was 0.8% higher at 325.65, alongside a 0.90% advance for the German Dax to 10,371.89 while the FTSE Mibtel was up by 1.19% to 16,918.74.

Front month Brent crude oil futures meanwhile were 3.35% higher to $28.65 a barrel on the ICE.

Euro/dollar meanwhile was drifting lower by 0.06% to 1.0903.

Earlier, the number of Covid-19 infections in Europe had jumped to nearly 1.0m, prompting the World Health Organisation's director for Europe, Hans Kluge, to warn that before lifting any lockdown measures countries needed to ensure that transmission of the virus was under control and that health systems had the capacity to identify, test, trace and isolate cases.

There was little in terms of fresh news on the economic side of things.

Germany's ministry of finance confirmed that consumer prices in the country edged up at a month-on-month pace of 0.1% in March and by 1.3% year-on-year.

At the euro area level meanwhile, Eurostat reported a 1.9% year-on-year decline in the bloc's industrial production in February.