Stock markets fall heavily as another 1.5m Americans claim benefits amid Covid-19 crisis – as it happened

US jobless data have confirmed that the world’s largest economy remains under severe pressure from the coronavirus – even if the absolute worst of the crisis appears to have abated.

Stock markets around the world have seen steep selloffs as investors rein in their optimism after the Federal Reserve poured cold water on their hopes that a recovery would be quick.

The FTSE 100 was on course for a 2.9% fall 90 minutes before the closing bell, and US stocks were showing similar declines.

James Knightley, chief international economist at ING, the investment bank, said:

Last Friday’s jobs report from the BLS reported unemployment at 13.3%, but today’s ‘insured’ unemployment rate based on continuing claims is at 14.4%. Add in all unemployment benefit recipients – including those receiving help under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and that’s 29,505,027 people – and we get 20.3% unemployment.

Here are some of the other important developments from today:

• Oil prices fell steeply as US inventories raised concerns over another supply glut and following the Federal Reserve’s warning over extended economic weakness. Brent crude futures prices fell by 6.8%, or almost $3 per barrel, to $38.89.
• Job cuts: British Gas owner Centrica will cut 5,000; chemicals company Johnson Matthey will cut 2,500; Business jet maker Bombardier will cut 600 jobs in Belfast.
• Just Eat Takeaway agreed a deal with US rival GrubHub for $7.3bn, shortly after the former completed its own merger.
• Unilever said it would combine its UK and Dutch entities into a single London-based PLC.

You can follow more of our live coverage from around the world:

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In the US, one of the officer charged over the killing of George Floyd is bailed as protesters topple a Confederate statue in Virginia

In our global coverage, the pandemic is accelerating across Africa as US cases top 2 million

Thank you for following our live coverage of business, economics and financial markets today. Join us tomorrow morning for more of the same. JJ

Here is what is weighing on Wall Street:

In just 12 weeks more than 44 million claims have been made for benefits as people lost their jobs. Rehiring appears to have started.

Last week the labor department said the unemployment rate had dipped in May to 13.3% from 14.7% in April – although officials said difficulty collecting data meant the figure was probably 3% higher.

You can read the full report here:

US stock markets have taken a heavy tumble in opening trades as investor optimism runs out of steam.

Here are the opening snaps:

• S&P 500 DOWN 88.15 POINTS, OR 2.76%, AT 3,101.99 AFTER MARKET OPEN
• DOW JONES DOWN 898.59 POINTS, OR 3.33%, AT 26,091.40 AFTER MARKET OPEN
• NASDAQ DOWN 228.67 POINTS, OR 2.28%, AT 9,791.68 AFTER MARKET OPEN

Canadian planemaker Bombardier plans to cut up to 600 jobs in its Northern Ireland operations, in another heavy blow to the UK economy.

The cuts are part of plans announced last week to cut 2,500 jobs or about 11% of the workforce in its global aviation unit.

The Canadian firm, which produces wings for Airbus’s A220 jet in Belfast, is the largest high-tech manufacturer in Northern Ireland with a workforce of around 3,500.

Investors are wary about signs of a potential second wave of Covid-19 cases, even as the world’s largest economy opens up.

Texas in particular showed a record number of hospitalisations for Covid-19 this week.

Ronald Temple, head of US equity at Lazard Asset Management, said:

The US labor market churn continues. Job losses in excess of 1.5m remain extremely high considering the pre-Covid record was 695,000 claims. Fortunately, continuing claims declined by 339,000 implying more people gained employment than lost it.

While the worst of the job losses might be behind us, the recent surges in new Covid-19 cases in states such as Texas and Arizona could stall the nascent recovery if not brought under control.

The 10th straight drop in initial claims is welcome, but they remain hugely elevate, said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. He said:

Our preliminary forecast for next week is for flat or slightly higher claims, based on Google search data and partial hard numbers from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that May’s payroll increase was a one-time fluke, because claims only measure the pace of gross layoffs, and tell us nothing about the pace of re-hiring of people laid off earlier in the crisis. But markets will not like to see any increase in the claims numbers, which will magnify the uneasiness now being triggered by the second wave of Covid cases, mostly in the South.

Over the course of the crisis there have been more than 43m jobless claims.

Allianz chief economic adviser Mohamed El-Erian, who warned earlier today that stock markets are getting ahead of the terrible economic data, welcomed the fall in intial and continuing claims.

Minneapolis Federal Reserve president Neel Kashkari had a somewhat different reaction:

An important factor in looking at the latest jobless claims report is how it squares with the non-farm payrolls data which last week showed the US economy added jobs – suggesting a quicker recovery was in the offing and taking pretty much everyone completely off guard.

One key thing to keep in mind is that – although a significant improvement, the data on their own are unprecedented before the crisis.

More than 1m jobless claims in a week was unheard of since comparable data were first collected in the 1960s. The coronavirus crisis broke the scale.

But then again, a recovery is a recovery, and today’s data do appear to show that the economic crisis has peaked (or at least its first wave).

Richard Flynn, UK managing director at Charles Schwab, a US broker, said:

The slight decline in initial jobless claims, following last week’s surprisingly upbeat nonfarm payroll numbers, suggests that the US recovery is slowly getting underway and the underlying economic fundamentals may be more robust than anticipated.

If this downward trend continues, it could help support the current market rally, but there are still potential risks to the recovery. The possibility of a second virus wave and ongoing civil unrest, alongside heightened rhetoric around US-China trade relations, may weigh on the confidence of consumers and businesses.

The weak data, which suggests the global economy might be in for a long, drawn-out recovery, has also added to the weight on the FTSE 100.

It has now lost 3% for the day, or 188 points. The mid-cap FTSE 250 is also down by 3%.

Germany’s Dax has lost 3.1% and France’s Cac 40 is down by 3.3%.

US stock market futures have extended their losses after the jobless reading.

Futures for the S&P 500, the US benchmark, are down by 2.6%. Dow Jones and Nasdaq futures point to 3.2% and 1.7% losses respectively when trading opens in about 40 minutes.

The number of Americans making continued claims for unemployment fell to 20.9m in the week ending 30 May, down from 21.3m in the prior week, the data showed.

The speed of the crisis has been unprecedented in recent history, with initial jobless claims hitting a record 6m in a week at the height of the crisis.

Some 1.54m Americans made new unemployment claims in the week ending on 6 June, according to the US Department of Labor, as the toll of the coronavirus crisis mounted further.

The reading, which was almost exactly in line with economists’ expectations, suggested the US economy is recovering as claims slowed, but it still portrayed a workforce suffering from a severe recession.

The previous week’s* reading was 1.88m.

Reaction to follow. *This post has been changed to correct “month” to “week”.