The global economy served up a mixture of green shoots and bitter herbs on Thursday, matching comments overnight from the U.S. Federal Reserve that the recession there appeared to be easing, but at no great pace.
"Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in April suggests that the pace of economic contraction is slowing," the Fed said in its policy statement at the end of a two-day meeting.
It kept interest rates near zero, stuck to, but did not increase, its huge programme of buying government and mortgage debt, and warned that the economy would remain weak for some time.
Weekly jobless claims data, due at 1230 GMT on Thursday, will give another reading on the state of the U.S. economy.
International Monetary Fund deputy managing director John Lipsky said the Fund's forecasts for the world economy could be raised slightly, given some positive signs, though he added that there was still significant uncertainty about the pace and timing of recovery.
New industrial orders in the euro zone were unequivocally weak, however, plunging more than a third year on year in April, a record decline that disappointed those who had seen hopes in March's figures that the worst was over.
"If you play the 'green shoot' game, it is better to avoid the hard data," ING economist Martin van Vliet noted.
In Germany, on the other hand, construction orders were up 6.3 percent month-on-month in April, the biggest increase in nine months.
That silver lining doesn't hide the cloud that orders were down 9.1 percent from a year ago, but the scale of the global downturn has been such that comfort is now taken in slowing rates of decline rather than positive growth. On that measure, German construction is doing less badly than it has done since September.
In France, Economy Minster Christine Lagarde said unemployment data there for May, due later in the day, would be "a little better" than in previous months.
In Italy, business confidence rose for the third straight month, but a little less than economists had forecast.
"We expect this trend of very slow recovery to continue, and in 2010 we see things stabilising rather than growing significantly," said Luigi Speranza at BNP Paribas.
Second-quarter earnings from H&M, the world's third-biggest biggest clothing retailer, also contained only qualified good news, with a rise in profit but flat sales for May.
ASIAN OUTLOOK
South Korea upgraded its economic forecast for 2009 on Thursday, saying Asia's fourth-largest economy was now expected to contract 1.5 percent, compared with a previous forecast of 2 percent.
That would still mark the worst performance since 1998, when the economy contracted 6.9 percent as the Asian financial crisis pushed South Korea to the brink of sovereign insolvency.
In China, an official at the State Administration of Foreign Exchange said the country had begun to see capital inflows again after heavy outflows in the previous two quarters.
Deputy director of international payments Guan Tao said the swing was not down to a new surge of money coming into China but because outflows were down. But since the outflows had been a symptom of the world's companies and banks scrambling to reclaim cash when the credit crunch was at its tightest, it was an encouraging sign that the crisis was easing.
But the fragility of any recovery was underlined by global airlines body IATA, which said demand for cross-border air freight dropped 17.4 percent year-on-year in May, suggesting international trade is still a long way from rude health.
And Toyota Motor Corp, the world's No.1 car maker, also poured a little water on the coals with a prediction of tough times for another two years and that it would continue to cut costs from its already lean operations so it could avoid a third consecutive year of losses.
Stock markets were generally weaker, with the MSCI world equity index down 0.4 percent, and Europe's FTSEurofirst 300 index falling 1.5 percent. Emerging stocks, however, rose 0.5 percent, and Japan's Nikkei ended up more than 2 percent.
