European stock indices stands still, equities of banks head north

On Thursday, European stock markets stood still in the beginning of the trading session. At the same time the publication of the next portion of corporate reports definitely offset the dive in BT equities due to the quite downbeat outcomes along with weakness of other utilities.

The surge in shares of RBS, which managed to come to an agreement with the United States of America in the investigation of the sale of mortgage-backed securities, as well as sound reporting by the largest financial institution of Italy dubbed UniCredit underpinned the banking sector. Aside from that the Pan-European index STOXX 600 traded nearly intact.

In addition to this, equities of British BT were caught inching down up to 7.8% right after the company announced its intention to cut about 13,000 jobs just to proceed with its quite ambitious plans to have itself restructured.

As a matter of fact, RBS securities inched up 4.6% after the bank agreed to shell out up to $4.9 billion, which is less than a great number of financial analysts had hoped for, just to settle US claims in the investigation of transactions with mortgage-backed securities.

The British FTSE index, however, headed south about 0.1% in the run-up to the Bank of England meeting on monetary policy. As expected, the regulator is going to leave interest rates intact.

UniCredit managed to ascend up to 1.9% because the financial institution reported a profit of about 1.1 billion euros for the first quarter. The given reading turned to be the best outcome since 2007 and even surpassed market expectations.

At the same time, the utilities demonstrated weakness, heading south about 0.8%, finding themselves among the leaders of the industry indices in Europe, amid a gloomy report from the Italian Enel.