World stocks were flat yesterday amid growing anxiety ahead of Washington’s end of week deadline to impose tariffs on Chinese imports, while the yuan steadied after China’s central bank acted to calm investors.

The MSCI All-Country World index, which tracks shares in 47 countries, was lower by less than 0.1 per cent on the day, recovering slightly from a 0.2 per cent fall earlier.

Washington has said it would implement tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese imports on July 6, and Beijing has promised to retaliate in kind on the same day.

However, China’s finance ministry said it will “absolutely not” fire the first shot in a trade war with the United States and will not be the first to levy tariffs.

Concerns about the outbreak of a global trade war have, among other factors, prevented a sustained recovery in global stock markets since a violent sell-off knocked them off records highs in February.

The United States has listed another 284 product lines valued at $16 billion that it will target with tariffs, including semiconductors and a broad range of electronics.

US President Donald Trump also threatened tariffs on as much as $400 billion worth of Chinese goods if Beijing retaliates against the US tariffs due to go into force on Friday.

The pan-European STOXX 600 index was last down 0.1 per cent, see-sawing from positive to negative territory during the day. Germany’s exporter-heavy DAX fell half a percent and Britain’s FTSE 100 fell 0.3 per cent.

Major currencies were treading water as traders fretted about the fallout of the intensifying trade frictions between Washington and the rest of the world. The euro was off by 0.1 per cent at $1.16450 while the dollar was good for 110.52 yen, down 0.1 per cent.

Meanwhile, Brent oil prices rose, driven higher by a threat from an Iranian commander and a drop in US crude inventories for the second week in a row caused by an outage at a Canadian facility.