Market overview: Miners, Big oil down

1600: Manufacturing conditions in the Philadelphia region remained in the doldrums in May, according to the latest report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The diffusion index for current activity fell to -1.8 from -1.6 in April. Economists had been expecting the index to move back into expansion territory with a reading of 3.5.

1553: Fed's Dudley says 15 June FOMC will be 'live'. However, he adds that the Fed's credibility would not be harmed if it chose not to move at that meeting.

1413: Fed Vice chair Stanley Fischer does not make any remarks on immediate Fed policy but spells out theoretical case for the need for better policies on infrastructure spending and taxation out of Congress.

1351: Fed's Lacker is out and saying markets picked up the wrong signal from the April FOMC, a hike would have been doable on either of those occasions, a report says citing Bloomberg. Under a Brexit scenario there may be grounds for the Fed to hold off until the July FOMC. Lacker is a well-known hawk and does not hold a vote on the FOMC this year, although he participates in the Fed's deliberations on policy.

1335: The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits fell a little less than expected last week, according to the Labor Department. US initial jobless claims dropped by 16,000 to a seasonally-adjusted 278,000 from the previous week’s unrevised level. Economists had been expecting a slightly bigger decline to 275,000.

1324: Greece's defence minister Panos Kammenos says the EgyptAir Airbus A320 had "turned 90 degrees left and a 360-degree turn to the right" and dropped more than 6,700m (20,000ft) before disappearing from radar, the BBC reports.

1255: Three-month copper futures are falling 0.7% to 4,582.00 per metric tonne.

1106: Royal Dutch Shell and BP are now lending their weight to the downside as crude oil futures come off. Although it has been years since the Footsie's direction of travel was tightly-linked to shares in the latter, they are still quite influential. Front month Brent crude futures are down 2.49% to $47.79 per barrel. Analysts at Credit Suisse have lowered their target prices on Burberry's (from 1,100p to 1,000p) and Thomas Cook (from 135p to 100p).

1037: "We are transitioning from a backdrop of stable China growth and relatively benign US growth to an outlook of weaker China and US growth. Risk is that we transition to a better US growth outlook and a relatively hawkish Fed. Overall, we are constructive on India, Indonesia and Malaysia bonds. In FX, we like short CNY against CFETS basket, short SGD NEER, short Baht. We like short CNY against CFETS basket. We also recommend selling CAD/MXN. We also remain short ZAR/RUB. We stay long PLN/HUF," strategists at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch say.

0932: UK retail sales rallied surprisingly strongly in April, rising 1.5% on the prior month. This was much higher than the consensus forecast for a 0.6% rise and up from the revised previous month's 0.7% fall. Year on year, retail sales rose 4.2%, beating the 2% market estimate and up from the revised previous 2.60% from March.

0924: Two US FOMC voters are set to hit the podium later today, including Fed vice-chair Stanley Fischer who tends to tread a finely nuanced path between the hawkish and dovish rate camps and NY Fed president William Dudley, whose rate hike expectations tend to lie towards the dovish side of the interest rate hike spectrum of forecasts, having recently indicated a bias towards two interest rate hikes this year. To take note of perhaps, as regards the recent shift in some Fed rhetoric, over the last few weeks some of the largest investment banks had pared their interest rte hike forecasts for 2016. That may have worried rate-setters in Washington, leading them to step-up the 'ante'.

0919: Shares in financials, banks and insurers, are continuing to see folow-through buying from the previous session when the yield curve steepened both in the UK and the US, especially after the release of the latest set of Fed minutes. The DJ Stoxx 600 bank sector gauge is up by 1.0% against a falling market. Travel&leisure stocks on the other hand are getting pummelled in London after a Paris-to-Cairo fliht presumably went down in the Southeastern Aegean. The sector gauge for those stocks is down by 1%.