Europe midday: Government coalition deal weighs on Italian stocks (only)
Italian stocks are slumping after Italy's main anti-establishment parties threw down the gauntlet to Brussels on austerity and against the bloc's fiscal rules.
On Friday morning, the Five Star party published some of the details of its coalition deal with its putative coalition partner, the League, which included a £678 monthly 'citizens' income' and lower personal tax rates.
News of the agreement, which must still be approved by the country's president, Sergio Mattarella, sent longer-term Italian government bond yields down again and weighed further on the country's benchmark equity index.
Against that backdrop, as of 1129 BST, Milan's FTSE Mibtel was sliding 1.17% or 278.16 points to trade at 23,523.20, alongside a 0.05% or 6.85 points dip on the German Dax to 13,108.64, while the Cac-40 was 0.02% or 1.20 points higher to 5,623.05.
The pan-European benchmkark Stoxx 600 meanwhile was dipping 0.16% or 0.62 points to 395.17, alongside a fall of 0.36% or 36.40 points to 10,180.0 for the Spanish Ibex 35.
Meanwhile, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Italian government bond was eight basis points higher at 2.19% after hitting an intarday high of 2.22%.
In the background, traders were scanning the headlines coming out of the ongoing trade talks between China and the US, in Washington.
The most important of those was a denial by Chinese officials that the Asian giant had offered to slash its country's trade deficit by $200bn via increased imports of American goods.
Both Accendo Markets's Mike van Dulken and IG's Joshua Mahony pointed to doubts about the success of those talks as a key factor that was weighing on investor sentiment.
Elsewhere on the economic front, Eurostat reported a rise in the euro area's seasonally adjusted trade surplus from €20.9bn for February to €21.2bn in March.
That came alongside a Eurozone current account surplus of €32.0bn for March.
Shares of Swedish retailer Hennes & Mauritz were in the spotlight on Thursday, amid continued reports of share purchases by its chairman Stefan Persson, which at the last count were running at roughly £543m for the year-to-date.
Fiat was also in the headlines after Bloomberg reported on company chief Sergio Marchionne's plans to unveil a strategic shift by the carmaker towards upscale models.
To the north, in France, Airbus was little changed despite a Reuters reports of a potential massive order by Dubai Aerospace for Airbus and Boeing jets.