Investors are braced for the release of the minutes from last month’s US Federal Reserve meeting, which will be read especially closely for any further clues regarding the committee’s inclinations regarding the timing and form of future QE tapering, and the first interest rate hike.

Stock markets have risen in Europe and the US ahead of the minutes, out at 7pm BST, while Asian shares slid, in the wake of a Chinese crackdown on the technology sector. Billions of dollars were wiped off the value of the Chinese ride-hailing app Didi.

Here is a round-up of today’s main stories:

House prices fell last month for the first time since January in a sign that the overheating UK housing market is finally starting to cool, according to lender Halifax.

The chairman of the London estate agents Foxtons has quit after the company’s biggest shareholder demanded a boardroom shakeup.

Britain’s jobs recovery could be delayed until the end of 2023 as thousands of workers struggle to find employment as the furlough scheme is phased out this year, according to analysis by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Senior City executives could be forced to have their pay linked to progress in making their workforces more diverse and inclusive, the UK’s financial watchdogs have said.

Wise (formerly known as TransferWise) has made a strong stock market debut giving the international payments firm a valuation of more than £8bn, making it the largest-ever listing of a UK tech company and buoying London’s hopes of attracting more technology companies looking to float.

The Evening Standard has reported a loss of £17m for last year as the coronavirus crisis kept its main readership of commuters and central London workers at home during the pandemic.

Heathrow is to trial fast-track lanes for fully vaccinated arrivals, in the latest attempt by the aviation industry to convince ministers it is safe to open up quarantine-free travel to amber list destinations.

JD Wetherspoon is seeking debt waivers from its lenders for the year ahead, with food and drink sales in its pub chain still well below pre-pandemic levels despite recent lockdown easing and the Euro 2021 tournament (which hasn’t been televised in its pubs).

Thank you for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow. Take care - JK

Wall Street has (mostly) opened higher.

• Dow Jones down 10 points at 34,567
• S&P 500 up 9 points, or 0.2%, at 4,352
• Nasdaq up 85 points, or 0.6%, at 14,749

Over here, the FTSE 100 index is trading 0.5% higher at 7,139 a gain of 38 points. In Frankfurt, the Dax has advanced 0.9% to 15,655 and the FTSE MiB in Milan has risen 0.3% to 25,297, while the CAC in Paris has slipped 0.1% to 6,501.

Britain’s jobs recovery could be delayed until the end of 2023 as thousands of workers struggle to find employment as the furlough scheme is phased out this year, according to analysis by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), reports our economics writer Phillip Inman.

A rise in the employment rate in recent months will go into reverse over the next six months before it regains momentum in 2022 and climbs back to its March 2020 level of 75.5%, the OECD forecast.

While many businesses say they are struggling to fill job vacancies and have called on ministers to tackle a shortage of skilled workers, the OECD said that ending the furlough scheme in September will force many businesses hit by pandemic-related restrictions to implement redundancies.

Senior City executives could be forced to have their pay linked to progress in making their workforces more diverse and inclusive, the UK’s financial watchdogs have said, reports our economics correspondent Richard Partington.

The Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said it wanted to speed up progress in making the City of London more diverse, in a step they said could help to boost the safety and soundness of UK banks and investment firms.

Setting out a package of reforms in a discussion paper, the regulators said they were considering mandatory rules to make senior leaders directly accountable for diversity and inclusion in their firms, as well as linking progress to their pay.

Despite progress in recent years, the Bank and the FCA said the pace of reform was still too slow and that it believed a more diverse financial sector could improve the decision making of companies, help spur innovation, and make products and services better suited to customers’ needs.

The regulators believe that increased diversity and inclusion will advance their statutory objectives by resulting in improved governance, decision-making and risk management within firms, a more innovative industry, and products and services better suited to the diverse needs of consumers.

Almost 200 finance companies signed up to the Women in Finance Charter have linked pay to internal gender diversity targets, as part of the voluntary scheme to promote representation in the City which is backed by the Treasury.

Heathrow is to trial fast-track lanes for fully vaccinated arrivals, in the latest attempt by the aviation industry to convince ministers it is safe to open up quarantine-free travel to amber list destinations, reports our transport correspondent Gwyn Topham.

Passengers travelling on selected British Airways and Virgin Atlantic flights from the US, Jamaica and Greece will be able upload proof of their Covid-19 vaccinations or present paper certificates before boarding, under a pilot programme to be launched this week.

The chairman of the London estate agents Foxtons has quit after the company’s biggest shareholder demanded a boardroom shakeup.

Ian Barlow, who has chaired Foxtons for the past eight years, is to stand down once a successor has been appointed, by the end of the year.

Foxtons’ largest shareholder Hosking Partners, which is run by the investment tycoon and prominent Brexiteer Jeremy Hosking, has been pushing for “radical board-level change” after the company’s poor share price performance in recent years. The company also faced down a major shareholder revolt over executive pay in April.

Barlow said:

A series of challenges to the London property market since the Brexit referendum, compounded more recently by the pandemic, have impaired our recent trading performance.

However, the business has huge potential and I am confident that the refreshed growth strategy, agreed by the board last year and set out in the capital markets day presentation in June, will result in a substantial rebound in performance.

The Evening Standard reported a loss of £17m last year as the coronavirus pandemic kept commuters and workers at home during the coronavirus pandemic, writes our media business correspondent Mark Sweney.

The London freesheet, which has run up losses of more than £40m in the past three years, saw revenues plunge by 31% from £64m to £44m for the 12 months to 27 September as advertisers froze budgets and readership plummeted. The newspaper, which has been hit particularly hard as it relies on advertising for 90% of revenues, saw pre-tax losses widen by more than a quarter from £13.6m in 2019 to £17.1m in 2020.

Last summer, management sought to dramatically cut costs including sacking a third of employees in a £4.2m restructuring programme, according to filings at Companies House published on Wednesday. The circulation of the Evening Standard which was also halved to just over 400,000 copies as the nationwide lockdowns kept the public at home.

The financial filings also show that the company also made £625,000 in “loss of office” compensation payments last year. In a year of major senior management upheaval Mike Soutar, the co-founder of magazine ShortList, resigned as chief executive after just six months into the role. He was replaced by Charles Yardley, the former senior executive at Forbes and City AM.

The newspaper also secured a £20m financing facility from its shareholders to help weather the pandemic, of which £7m was used by the end of the financial year in September.

The Evening Standard is controlled by Evgeny Lebedev, who was given a peerage last year after becoming friends with Boris Johnson during his tenure as mayor of London. In 2018, Lebedev sold a 30% stake in the Evening Standard to a Cayman Islands company, which later turned out to be controlled by a bank with close ties to the Saudi Arabian state.

Lebedev also controls the online-only Independent which in February reported an increase in profits from £2.3m to £2.7m and revenues, from £27m to £30m, in the year to 27 September 2020 thanks to increased digital readership during the pandemic.

Last June, Emily Sheffield, a former reporter at the Evening Standard and the Guardian, was named editor of the Evening Standard. Sheffield, who took over from former chancellor George Osborne, is the sister of former prime minister David Cameron’s wife, Samantha.

Like-for-like sales at Wetherspoon have continued to decline despite the easing of pandemic restrictions.

Bar and food sales at the pub chain dropped 49% between 12 April and 16 May, when pubs reopened for outdoor dining, and sales were still down 14.6% between 17 May and 4 July when pubs were fully open.

During the Euro 2020 football tournament, like-for-like sales have fallen nearly 21%, as Wetherspoon pubs have not televised matches apart from a few exceptions for individual matches. (England face Denmark in a semi-final at Wembley at 8pm BST tonight, while Italy beat Spain 4-2 on penalties last night, moving on to Sunday’s final.)

The company had net debt of £865m on 4 July and its lenders have relaxed conditions on its loans. Wetherspoons wants to negotiate further waivers for the next financial year “in due course”.

European markets have opened higher, with the UK and Germany leading the way.

• UK’s FTSE 100 up 40 points, or 0.6% at, 7,141
• Germany’s Dax up 0.6%
• France’s CAC up 0.4%
• Spain’s Ibex up 0.3%
• Europe’s Stoxx 600 up 0.4%

Good morning and welcome to our rolling coverage of the world economy, the financial markets, the eurozone and business.

House prices in the UK dropped 0.5% in June from May, the first monthly fall since January, according to Halifax, one of the UK’s biggest mortgage lenders. The annual growth rate has fallen to 8.8% from May’s 14-year high of 9.6%, as the stamp duty holiday is being phased out now until September.

The tax cut was introduced by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, in June last year to revive the housing market, which effectively shut down in the first couple of months of the pandemic.

The average price of a property was £26,358 in June. Average prices are still more than £21,000 higher than this time last year, following nearly a year of strong gains.

Russell Galley, managing director at Halifax, says:

With the stamp duty holiday now being phased out, it’s was predicted the market might start to lose some steam entering the latter half of the year, and it’s unlikely that those with mortgages approved in the early months of summer expected to benefit from the maximum tax break, given the time needed to complete transactions.

That said, with the tapered approach, those purchasing at the current average price of £260,358 would still only pay about £500 in stamp duty at today’s rates, increasing to around £3,000 when things return to normal from the start of October.

Buyers have been seeking out detached family homes in particular, amid an exodus from cities to smaller towns and rural areas, as many people switched to working from home during the pandemic. Galley says:

Government support measures over the last year have helped to boost demand, particularly amongst buyers searching for larger family homes at the upper end of the market. Indeed, the average price of a detached home has risen faster than any other property type over the past 12 months, up by more than 10% or almost £47,000 in cash terms. At a cost of over half a million pounds, they are now £200,000 more expensive than the typical semi-detached house.

In Germany, industrial production unexpectedly fell 0.3% in May from the previous month, according to the country’s Federal Statistical Office (Destatis). Production surged 17.3% compared with May last year, when large parts of industry scaled back production because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Compared with February 2020, the month before Covid-19 restrictions were imposed, production in May was 5% lower.

Carsten Brzeski, global head of macro at ING, says:

Disappointing and sluggish industrial production in the first two months of the second quarter suggests that supply chain disruptions, like the blockage of the Suez Canal in April or the ongoing semiconductor delivery problems, have not left German industry unscathed.

The overall direction of industrial production, however, is still up…The rebound will come, it just doesn’t follow the German principle of ‘Pünktlichkeit’.

On the markets, investors are braced for minutes from the US Federal Reserve’s last meeting, out tonight, which could show a shift towards tightening of policy. Asian stock markets slid, also pressured by a Chinese crackdown on technology companies. Japan’s Nikkei fell 1.1% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng lost 0.89% to near six-month lows while the Australian market was up 0.9%.

European stock futures are pointing to a slightly higher open over here.

Minutes of the Fed’s June meeting will be scrutinised for any signs of how serious members were about tapering the huge asset buying programme, and when the first interest rate hike might come.

The Agenda

• 7.45am BST: France trade for May
• 9am BST: Italy retail sales for May
• 12pm BST: US MBA Mortgage applications for week of 2 July
• 7pm BST: US Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) Minutes