Europe midday: Technology, Basic Resources lead fallers
News that negotiators from Westminster and Brussels have made headway in talks on a post-Brexit transition period is helping to lift stocks off their lows of the session.
Stocks had sustained heavy losses earlier, with international trade frictions very much in focus ahead of a two-day G-20 finance ministers' meeting in Buenos Aires and ahead of the key US central bank policy meeting on Wednesday.
To take note of, overnight US undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs, David Malpass, incorrectly announced that his country had called off the US-China Comprehensive Economic Dialogue, but afterwards backtracked, Bloomberg reported.
Separately, on Sunday German finance minister Olaf Scholz said he was "seriously concerned" about trade frictions with the US, telling Bild that the foundation of our prosperity - free trade - was being put at risk.
Against that backdrop, as of 1306 GMT the benchmark Stoxx 600 had halved its losses to trade down by 0.44% or 1.68 points to stand at 376.01, alongside a 0.88% or 118.53 point fall on the German Dax to 12,271.72 and a 0.28% or 62.90 point decline on the FTSE Mibtel to 22,793.84.
In parallel, euro/dollar had reversed an earlier dip and 0.19% higher to 1.2312.
Also weighing on sentiment was a sharp drop in stock of Facebook following reports at the weekend that it might have mishandled the data of roughly 50m users.
Thus, and from a sector standpoint, the Stoxx 600 technology gauge was retreating 1.79% to 447.33, alongside a 1.30% drop in a subindex of Basic Resource companies, although the subindex for lenders' shares was near its best levels of the day at 181.36, down by just 0.02%.
New home prices rose in 44 cities in February, down from 52 in January, according to China's National Bureau of Statistics.
Ahead of that G-20 gathering, at the weekend European Central Bank Governing Council member Francois Villeroy sounded a confident note on the outlook for inflation, even as Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann called for "a rapid end" to quantitative easing.
Klaas Knot, the Dutch central bank's head, also appeared to have a high degree of conviction in the prospect for higher prices.
Speaking from Buenos Aires, he said: "Inflation has been fairly stable so that provides me with a high degree of confidence that actually inflation will pick up and will at some point approach the definition of price stability."
In parallel, in an ECB sources report, Reuters said the debate among policy-makers in Frankfurt was increasingly about properly calibrating the correct path for interest rate expectations following a first increase in interest rates in mid-2019.
On the economic data front, ISTAT reported a much weaker-than-expected reading on the country's industrial output, which it said shrank by 1.9% month-on-month in January (consensus: -0.3%), led by an 8.6% drop in utilities output.
Meanwhile, according to Eurostat the euro area's trade surplus slipped from €23.2bn in December to €19.9bn for January. Economists had penciled-in a reading of €22.5bn.
Later in the day, Belgium's central bank was set to release its consumer confidence gauge for March at 1400 GMT.
Meanwhile, in corporate news, Daimler was reportedly in the midst of a €3bn effort to ramp-up production from the 2.4m vehicles sold in 2017 to 3m units this year.
In France, oil major Total said it had been awarded a 40-year 20% interest in the Umm Shaif and Nasr concessions by Abu Dhabi's National Oil Company.
Further to the East, in Italy, US activist investor Elliott Advisors sent a letter to Telecom Italia shareholders asking for a "truly independent" board to be put in place to improve performance.