Confidence in London's stock market, as in New York, remained extremely strained yesterday as the prospect of a sequence of interest rate rises in Britain, US and the euro zone continued to unnerve investors. Those interest rate worries intensified yesterday with the publication of a series of strong economic numbers from all three areas.

Early in the session, the FTSE 100 index built painfully on the tentative gains accrued on Wednesday and Thursday, edging ahead to a session high of 6,059.0, up 30 points, after Wall Street's strong closing performance on Thursday, which saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 123 points. But the emergence of worrying strong purchasing managers data from the UK and the US brought about a gradual erosion of that early confidence. The FTSE 100 subsided to a day's low of 5,960.3, down 69.5, before ending the day 59.1 off at 5,970.7.