Europe close: Stocks slip amid trade worries, Greek shares outperform

Shares on the Continent slipped as investors reacted to reports that Brussels might be set to slap a fine on Rome over its public finances and amid ongoing hawkish rhetoric from China and the US in their ongoing trade war.

In the background meantime, a majority of commentators expressed relief at the fact that the various far right groups across Europe had not managed to make as many inroads in the elections to the European Parliament as some had feared.

The take from analysts at Deutsche Bank was that: "together with the liberals and greens, pro-European groups will still hold a clear majority of two-thirds of the seats in the next EP.

"But policymaking for them will likely become more complex and require broader cross-party agreements and discipline."

But the biggest drag on sentiment came from the White House, after the US President said overnight that tariffs on Chinese exports "could go up very, very substantially, very easily."

Speaking in Tokyo, Trump said: "I think sometime in the future China and the United States will absolutely have a great trade deal, and we look forward to that.

"Because I don’t believe that China can continue to pay these, really, hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs. I don’t believe they can do that."

By the end of trading, the benchmark Stoxx 600 had drifted lower by 0.22% to 375.90, alongside a drop of 0.37% to 12,027.05 for the German Dax, while the FTSE Mibtel had fallen by 0.50% to 20,260.98.

Greek stocks on the other hand added to Monday's big gains, which had been triggered by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras's announcement that he would call snap elections.

Some observers said might see the more pro-business New Democracy party reach power.

On the back of the news, the Athens's Stock Exchange's general index ran up another 2.32% to 794.63.

In parallel, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Italian government note was one basis point higher to 2.68%, having risen by 13 points during the prior session.

Reports on Monday had indicated that the European Commission might initiate a disciplinary procedure against Rome as soon as 5 June and although Brussels had never imposed a fine on any euro country because of excessive government spending, the news had weighed heavily on Italian government debt.

Renault and Fiat continued to be in the spotlight following the prior day's surge after announcing their proposed merger which, if successful, would result in the creation of the world's third largest carmaker.

Nevertheless, analysts at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch were unimpressed, choosing instead to highlight the cost pressures that the industry was facing and lowering their target for Renault's shares to €65.

Stock in SAS was deeply unwanted after the Swedish airline group reported a second quarter loss of 1.22bn krona, which was more than twice the 488m krona of red ink that it recorded one year ago (consensus: SEK808m).

Not so shares of Greece's Eurobank Ergasias, which jumped after Fitch Ratings lifted its rating on the lender's long-term debt by one notch to CCC+ to reflect the fact that it had not been reliant on emergency funding since February and the improvement seen in deposit inflows.

On the economic front meanwhile, the latest reading for German consumer confidence revealed that sentiment in the euro area's largest economy resumed the slight downward trend which had been in place since the beginning of 2018.

GfK's consumer confidence index for Germany dipped from May's downwardly revised reading of 10.2 to 10.1 for June.

Nonetheless, Claus Vistesen at Pantheon Macroeconomics believed that the survey continued to point to "decent" growth in consumer spend overall, although he expected a slowdown to materialise in the second quarter.

On a stronger note, the European Commission's economic sentiment index for the euro area rose from a reading of 103.9 for April to 105.1 in May, for the first increase since June 2018.

The European Central Bank meanwhile reported that the rate of growth in the euro area's money supply picked up from March's annualised pace of 4.6% to 4.7% in April (consensus: 4.4%).