Europe midday: Stocks slip amid ongoing growth and trade concerns
Stocks on the Continent are trading on the back foot, weighed down by multiple warnings regarding the outlook for the global economy and stockmarkets.
Weighing on sentiment, Swiss investment bank UBS reported a near $13bn of withdrawals of funds by its global wealth and asset management clients at the end of 2018, warning that heightened protectionism and geopolitical tensions would continue to take their toll in the first quarter of 2019.
"It's been a weak start for European markets in the wake of yesterday's IMF downgrade of its expectations for global growth this year [...] This shouldn't have been a surprise to most investors given the weakness of recent economic data, particularly in Europe," said CMC Markets UK's Michael Hewson.
On that note, reports published overnight cited Chinese President Xi Jinping as having warned a seminar of top provincial leaders and ministers in Beijing, on Monday, that the Communist Party needed to make greater efforts to reach its goals, including maintaining its "long-term rule" in the face of challenges, such as slower economic growth.
Against that backdrop, as of 1155 GMT, the benchmark Stoxx was down by 0.44% or 1.58 points to 354.78, alongside a drop of 0.72% or 35.0 points for the French Cac-40 to 4,832.76 while the FTSE Mibtel was off by 1.06% or 208.23 points at 19,430.66.
In parallel, the Stoxx 600 sector gauge for banks was falling 1.30% to 140.26, with shares of UBS pacing losses, trading down by 3.84%.
Out in the commodities space, front month Brent crude oil futures were off by 2.12% at $61.44 per barrel on the ICE, alongside a 0.08% dip in euro/dollar to 1.13592.
There was also some verbal sparing going on in the background, with President Donald Trump telling China via social media to "stop playing around" given the drop in the country's rate of growth to its slowest pace since 1990.
The editor of China's Global Times responded saying that Beijing would not sign an "unequal" deal.
But it wasn't all bad news, with the ZEW Institute's widely-followed economic confidence gauge for Germany rising by 2.5 points to print at -15.0 for January (consensus: -18.5).
The think-tank's President, Achim Wambach, expressed surprise at the results, describing the resilience in analysts' confidence in the face of trade tensions and the uncertainty around Brexit as "remarkable".
Further south on the other hand, Spain's INE reported a 34.8% increase in the country's trade deficit over the year to November to reach €30.6bn, with exports growing by 3.4% over that same time frame and imports 6.0% higher.