In Brexit news, the UK has told the EU that it will NOT apply for an extension to the transition period, which ends on 31 December.

The European Commission’s vice president Maros Sefcovic said there is still a lot of work to do before a trade deal can be struck and the window of opportunity is closing for London before the transition period ends, Reuters reported.

He spoke after talks with British cabinet office minister Michael Gove, who told him the UK had no intention of asking for an extension of the transition period beyond the end of this year.

Ali has extended its trial of grocery home deliveries in partnership with Deliveroo into London. The German chain will offer the service at its Camden store and customers will be able to order around 200 essential products through the Deliveroo app, which will be delivered by Deliveroo riders. Delivery costs £4.99.

Last month, Aldi started a trial at eight stores in the east Midlands, which has gone well. it said:

In the three weeks since we launched our partnership with Deliveroo, feedback from customers has been very positive.

Unlike the other big supermarkets, Aldi does not usually deliver, apart from wine and non-food items such as electrical appliances and garden tools.

The Deliveroo tie-up came after Aldi started selling online food parcels in April. The £24.99 food parcels, designed to help vulnerable and elderly shoppers, contain 22 set essential products including rice, pasta, tea and toilet roll and are delivered directly from Aldi’s warehouse.

Let’s take another look at today’s other news. As reported earlier, British Airways, easyJet and Ryanair have filed papers in the high court to seek an urgent judicial review of the government’s quarantine laws, which they say are having a devastating effect on tourism and the wider economy. Here’s our story:

And UK travellers have been urged not to bring hand luggage on board to reduce the risk of coronavirus transmission, under new government guidance.

Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx and the Bash Street Kids – characters from the popular Beano comics – will soon be teaching primary school children about money.

Beano for Schools is a new primary school teaching resource on money and financial wellbeing, brought to us by the Bank of England, Beano and Tes, formerly known as the Times Educational Supplement, a weekly UK publication aimed at education professionals.

It will be included in the Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) curriculum.

The website, which can be previewed here, has a set of 12 lessons about Money and Me where the Beano gang will educate youngsters between 5 and 11 about the basics of how money and the economy work. It launches in July. Teachers can sign up now to register their interest in the free resource.

To mark My Money Week, the Bank of England announced the collaboration. Andrew Bailey, its governor, said:

Financial literacy is essential for everyone. The Bank’s education programme is central to our role in equipping the public with sufficient financial and economic knowledge for their daily lives. We are delighted to partner with Beano and Tes on the new Money and Me resource, which will take our programme into primary schools. It will support teachers in giving young people a strong sense of the importance of economic and financial decisions from an early age.

Emma Scott, chief executive of Beano Studios, says:

Beano has been engaging children for more than 80 years, and we love bringing that experience to the classroom. Our Beano for Schools programme translates complex topics into entertaining and engaging content for both kids and teachers and we’ve had fun producing these unique financial literacy lessons so kids can enjoy learning about money and gain necessary life skills.

Derrick Dunne, chief executive at Beaufort Investment, explains why markets have shrugged off the staggering falls in UK GDP and eurozone industrial production in April.

Yesterday’s falls aside, the markets have been buoyant while we get more Q2 data for the real economy. The Fed has ruled out interest rate rises for the foreseeable future indicating it thinks things will be difficult for the medium term. This is good for stock markets.

For instance, the GDP output of the UK economy fell by 20.4% in April. But at the time of writing, the FTSE 100 is up over 1% today. Although the GDP fall is unprecedented, it is no surprise given this is when the economy went into lockdown. The stock market is not reacting aversely to historic information.

Now, it is reacting more to how we come out of this. The government has provided a good deal of support thus far and will likely have to think carefully about how it deals with each sector in the coming months. The ongoing effect of CV19 will not be the same for each industry.

The FTSE 100 in London is 1.2% ahead, rising 74 points to 6,152. Germany’s Dax has gained 1.1% to 12,104, France’s CAC 40 has rallied 2% to 4,913 and Italy’s FTSE MiB has added 1.27% to 19,046. US stock futures are pointing to a higher open on Wall Street later.

Connor Campbell, financial analyst at trading platform Spreadex, explains:

After a torrid week, Europe attempted to reignite June’s rally, doing so with a fair amount of gusto.

There was little reason behind Friday’s gains, beyond investors deciding that the severe losses of the last few days provide a handy entry point to a market that had gone on a hell of a run at the start of the month.

A huge reason why Europe feels comfortable enough to post such gains is that the Dow Jones is aiming for a 600 point rebound when the bell rings on Wall Street. It’s a sign of just how staggering Thursday’s losses were that such a surge would only recoup a third of that decline. Nevertheless, it is a strong comeback, especially considering the US increasingly looks like it is going to face a second wave of coronavirus cases.

In terms of data, US import prices are set to rise from -2.6% to 0.6% month-on-month, while the preliminary consumer sentiment reading from the University of Michigan is expected to jump from 72.3 to 75.0.

The National Institute Of Economic and Social Research has published its analysis of this morning’s GDP data from the Office for National Statistics. You can read it here.

It says the UK economy looks set to decline by 20% to 25% in the second quarter, a significantly steeper decline than the first quarter’s 2% drop, reflecting the full impact of lockdown measures.

Kemar Whyte, senior economist at the economic research institute, says:

The economy now appears to have bottomed out, as recent survey evidence suggests an easing in the rate of contraction in the manufacturing and services sector. The re-opening of non-essential stores from 15 June, coupled with the government’s continued support should aid a gradual, albeit limited, recovery in domestic activity.

In the “real world,” the world’s biggest exhibition company expects to host its first major post-Covid-19 event in China next month. My colleague Mark Sweney reports:

Informa, the world’s largest exhibition company, said it has cancelled or postponed more than 160 events worth £300m in revenue and a further 300 have been run as digital instead of physical events.

The company, which raised £1bn in April to help weather the financial impact of the pandemic, said it has made more than £400m in cost savings including a recruitment and salary review freeze.

The company, which has seen its share price slump more than 40% over the last year, said that its first major post-coronavirus event will be the China Beauty Expo in Shanghai at the beginning of next month.

These are the largest monthly falls recorded since the start of the series, significantly higher than the 3% to 4% drops seen in late 2008 and early 2009 during the financial crisis, Eurostat said.

Spain, Germany, France and Italy were among the countries that suffered the biggest declines.

Stocks are pushing higher, with the FTSE 100 in London now up 1.16% while the CAC 40 in Paris is 1.27% ahead and the FTSE MiB in Milan has gained 1.26%.

Despite the shocking UK economic data, all of the main UK and European stock markets have now turned positive.

• UK’s FTSE 100 up 18 points, or 0.3%, at 6,095
• Germany’s Dax up 0.25% at 12,000
• France’s CAC 40 up 0.6% at 4,845
• Italy’s FTSE MiB up 0.5% at 18,904

Faced with this unprecedented recession, the Bank of England is expected to add to the £200bn of asset purchases it announced in March, to revive the economy. Economists are forecasting another increase of at least £100bn in the bond-buying programme.

Andrew Bailey, the central bank’s governor, said on Wednesday that this downturn is not a “normal recession” and that there will be some long-term damage.

If there is any such thing as a normal recession ... this one will be different. There will be elements of a faster recovery, because the first stage of the recovery is literally lifting restrictions and allowing people to go out.

And we see ... evidence of elements of that recovery starting.

Turning to long-term damage, as some businesses will go bust and some business models such as packed bars will no longer appeal to the public, he added:

We don’t know how much scarring there will be. I think it is reasonably to say there will be some but it is very hard to judge.

Britain’s economic recovery will be a far more drawn-out affair than the collapse, warns Capital Economics analyst Andrew Wishart.

At its peak in April the lockdown reduced economic output by 25%, making the coronavirus crisis by far the deepest recession on record. The peak-to-trough fall in GDP was 7% in both the Global Financial Crisis and the Great Depression. Having plumbed those unprecedented depths, the economy is now on the return leg.

Given the lockdown started to be eased in May, April will mark the trough in GDP. Overall, we are past the worst. But the recovery will be a drawn-out affair as restrictions are only lifted gradually and businesses and consumers continue to exercise caution. And while the trough in activity is now behind us, the fiscal cost of the collapse and the impact on the labour market, including the rise in the unemployment rate to over 8% that we expect, are only just starting to emerge.

Back to the markets. The FTSE 100 index and Germany’s Dax have recouped some of their losses in early trading and are now almost flat, while French and Italian shares have risen slightly.

• UK’s FTSE 100 index down 0.06% at 6,074
• Germany’s Dax down 0.02%
• France’s CAC up 0.15%
• Italy’s FTSE MiB up 0.35%

In other news, Britain’s three biggest airlines – British Airways, easyJet and Ryanair – have now launched legal action against the UK government’s quarantine policy, according to BA’s parent IAG. They have asked for a judicial review to be heard as soon as possible.

The three airlines argue that the policy is irrational and unfair, as it comes months after the UK’s Covid-19 lockdown was imposed, and at a time when the pandemic is easing. The quarantine took effect on Monday and requires air passengers arriving in the UK from abroad to self-isolate for 14 days.

The aviation and travel industries fear that it will kill off a nascent recovery in air travel.

Hotels, B&Bs, cafes and restaurants were worst hit during the Covid-19 lockdown, recording a 91.8% slump in output between January and April, notes Samuel Tombs, chief UK economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.

The economy will take a long time to recover from the pummelling inflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic. April’s unprecedented drop in GDP extends the decline from January’s peak to a gargantuan 25.2%. This collapse greatly surpasses the 6% peak-to-trough decline in GDP seen in the 2008-to-09 recession, which previously was the deepest in post-war history.

Output in April was below its January level in all but one of the 20 sub-sectors of the economy; output in the public administration sector ticked up by 0.2%.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), the UK’s oldest independent economic research institute, has sent us some quick thoughts on this morning’s data.

UK and European shares have fallen at the open.

• UK’s FTSE 100 index down 1.3%
• Germany’s Dax down 0.9%
• France’s CAC down 1%
• Spain’s Ibex down 0.6%
• Italy’s FTSE MiB down 0.9%

James Smith, developed markets economist at ING, says:

Today’s data won’t necessarily come as much of as a surprise to markets - it shows the damage was a little greater than expected, but the reality is that markets have become fairly desensitised to big numbers over recent weeks. We know too that April was the first month to be fully encompassed by the lockdown. But these figures are nevertheless shocking, and it goes without saying that this kind of fall in activity is virtually unprecedented, either in scale or speed.

Social distancing constraints, consumer and business caution, as well as Brexit, all pose challenges to the UK economic recovery. This is set to keep the pressure on the Bank of England to continue expanding its balance sheet, and we expect a further increase in its quantitative easing programme next week.

The record fall in UK GDP in April means that the economy lost £30bn. The decline is much worse than during the financial crisis. The ONS says:

The monthly decline in GDP in April 2020 is three times greater than the fall experienced during the 2008 to 2009 economic downturn. During the global financial crisis, from the peak in February 2008 to the lowest point of March 2009, a total of 13 months, GDP contracted 6.9%.

The figures suggest that the British economy is suffering one of the worst downturns in the world.

The UK economy shrank by an unprecedented 10.4% in the three months to April, the ONS’s rolling three-month estimate showed.

April’s decline reflected widespread falls in services, production and construction output, the ONS said.

Industrial output fell 20.3% in April, the largest monthly fall since records began in 1968. Manufacturing, which makes up three-quarters of industrial output (the rest is utilities, mining and quarrying), plunged 24.3%.

Services output was down 19% and construction output plummeted 40.1% as companies downed tools during the nationwide lockdown.

All declines were the biggest on record, and worse than City economists had expected.

The UK’s deputy national statistician for economic statistics Jonathan Athow said:

April’s fall in GDP is the biggest the UK has ever seen, more than three times larger than last month and almost ten times larger than the steepest pre-COVID-19 fall. In April the economy was around 25% smaller than in February.

Virtually all areas of the economy were hit, with pubs, education, health and car sales all giving the biggest contributions to this historic fall.

Manufacturing and construction also saw significant falls, with manufacture of cars and housebuilding particularly badly affected.

The UK’s trade with the rest of the world was also badly affected by the pandemic, with large falls in both the import and export of cars, fuels, works of art and clothing.

There is a ton of UK economic data out this morning. The GDP figure for April was worse than expected, showing an economic contraction of 20.4% in April from the month before, as the economy was paralysed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Factories, shops, restaurants cafes, bars, building sites and schools shut across the country, with only “essential” stores such as supermarkets and pharmacies allowed to open.