By Peter Nurse
Investing.com - European stock markets are set to open lower Friday, weighed by another drop in oil prices as the number of global coronavirus cases tops one million and U.S. unemployment soars.
At 2:15 AM ET (0615 GMT), the DAX futures contract in Germany traded 1.0% lower. France's CAC 40 futures were down 0.7%, while the FTSE 100 futures contract in the U.K. fell 0.3%.
Equity markets received a boost Thursday from hopes to an end of disorderly conditions in the world oil market. Crude prices jumped on the back of comments from U.S. President Donald Trump indicating that a deal between major oil producers Russia and Saudi Arabia to slash global supply was on its way.
However, the new day has seen a new tone and the oil market has handed back some of those gains amid skepticism that a deal will be announced in the new future.
At 2:!5 AM ET U.S. crude futures traded 4.6% lower at $24.16 a barrel. The international benchmark Brent contract fell 4.6% to $28.56.
At the same time, the pandemic has shown few signs of abating Friday, with global cases surpassing one million, and more than 53,000 deaths. The pandemic has spread further in the United States and the death toll climbed in Spain and Italy to 10,000 and 13,000 respectively.
Further evidence of the economic damage from widespread lockdown orders to contain the spread of coronavirus emerged in the U.S., with an unprecedented number of workers - 6.6 million - filing jobless claims.
There’s more U.S. employment data to come at 8:30 AM ET (12:30 GMT), in the form of the official jobs report for March. However, the cut-off date for this data is the week of March 12, before any major U.S. state had gone into lockdown.
For that reason, economists are expecting a drop in nonfarm payrolls of just 100,000, according to forecasts compiled by Investing.com. The unemployment rate is seen rising to 3.8% from 3.5% and average hourly earnings are expected to have climbed 0.2%.
In corporate news, the European banking sector will again be in focus after both Banco Santander (MC:SAN) and BNP Paribas (PA:BNPP) announced that they would be following many of their European peers in cancelling their final dividends for 2019.
This follows the European Central Bank asking banks not to pay dividends until October in order to conserve cash. Authorities are desperate to stop a crisis in the real economy infecting the financial system too.
There are a number of important economic numbers due Friday, aside from the U.S. payrolls release, including services PMI data in the eurozone and ISM non-manufacturing PMI in the U.S. These are set to provide more information about the impact of the business lockdowns in the respective regions.
Elsewhere, gold futures fell 0.5% to $1,630.20/oz after a late rally on Thursday, while EUR/USD traded at 1.0843, down 0.1% on the day.