Europe midday: Stocks slip amid rising trade tensions

Stocks remain near their worst levels of the session amid concerns that trade talks between China and the US had entered rocky waters.

"While it would be nice to believe the hope and hype, yesterday's reports that Chinese officials had made large scale systematic edits to a 150-page trade treaty draft, prompting accusations of backtracking by US officials, would appear to suggest that the bar to any form of deal by the weekend is so high, you wouldn’t be able to vault over it," said CMC Markets UK's Michael Hewson.

Ahead of Chinese vice premier Liu He's arrival in Washington for talks on Thursday morning, the country's Commerce Ministry denied allegations that it had walked back on its promises, with a spokesman saying: "China is credible and honors its word and that has never changed."

In response to Beijing's backtracking, Washington was set to move ahead with raising its 10% tariff on $200bn-worth of Chinese goods the next day - putting an end to the two countries' trade truce - and China had already replied that it would retaliate.

But many analysts had turned visibly more cautious in their assessment of the current state of talks and even on the risk that negotiations might stall.

As of 1328 BST, the benchmark Stoxx 600 was down by 0.91% at 378.77, alongside a drop of 0.94% on the German Dax to 12,065.49 while the Cac-40 was off by 1.32% to 5,346.48.

Trade-sensitive sectors such as Autos&Parts were among the worst performers, with the Stoxx 600 sector gauge dropping 2.61%.

What little fresh economic news was available on Thursday was less than inspiring.

According to Spain's national statistics office, industrial production in the Mediterranean country fell at a year-on-year pace of 3.1% in March (consensus: -1.0%).

Greek unemployment meanwhile was reported at 18.5% for February, although the prior month's level was revised up by a tenth of a percentage point to 18.6%.