Ben Brettell, senior economist at Hargreaves Lansdown, comments:

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The UK manufacturing sector recorded a contraction of 0.3% in the quarter to September, following a 0.5% contraction in the previous three months. That was partly the result of a reduction in maintenance in oil and gas facilities, compared with previous years, the ONS says. The decline in manufacturing output was offset by a 2.4% increase in mining and quarrying and a 1.2% increase in water and waste management, it adds.

We appear to have gone back in time about five years: the Office for National Statistics (ONS), external says the biggest drag on UK economic growth was the construction sector, which contracted by 2.2% in the third quarter.

UK economic growth has fallen back to 0.5% in the three months to September, official figures show. That's down from 0.7% in the previous quarter and about half the figure for the same three months last year.

 Howard Archer, chief European & UK economist at IHS, tweets:   

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Metro Bank, the UK challenger bank, has more than doubled lending in the year to September to £3bn as it prepares to float next year, Bloomberg reports, external. Deposits rose 87% to £4.4bn, while the number of current accounts jumped 51% to 601,000.   

One little nugget from the BP results may give investors some cause for concern: "Looking forward to the fourth quarter, we expect reduced refining margins and lower seasonal demand to adversely impact fuels margins and volumes compared with the third quarter." 

In other words, the refinery or downstream business - which has kept BP's head above water for the past year - isn't going to be as profitable as in the last three months. The oil giant may be preparing investors for slightly disappointing full-year results. 

What a difference a day makes. After closing down 12% yesterday, shares in TalkTalk have risen more than 6% today to 239.8p despite the company's hardline on waiving contract cancellation fees. 

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Commenting about Shop Direct's impressive annual results today, chief executive Alex Baldock tells 5 live Breakfast he thinks the owner of Very.co.uk and Littlewoods.com (whose advertising features Myleene Klass, pictured) has "got a lead over the market”. He also denies that the retailer has left older customers in the lurch now it is online-only: “Many of our catalogue customers are now coming online.” 

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The FTSE 100 is off to a poor start, down 0.4% at 6,390 points despite BP adding 1.5%, making it the top riser. European markets are also down, with shares in BASF and Novartis falling after weak updates from both companies. The Dax in Frankfurt has fallen 0.5% and the Cac in Paris is off 0.45%.

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BP shares have risen about 1.5% at 390.2p in London - no doubt helped by the fact the oil giant has raised its third quarter dividend a touch to 10 cents (6.5p) a share from 9.75 cents per share. 

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Like Novartis, Canon is another company to cut its full-year profits outlook today, blaming slower-than-expected demand for digital cameras in China and southeast Asia. 

The world's biggest maker of cameras and printers now expects operating profit of 365bn yen (£2bn) for this year, down from the previous estimate of 380bn yen, with the sales total also trimmed a touch to 3.8 trillion yen. 

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BP will hope that it has nearly brought an end to the many claims it has been subjected to over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster in 2010. Its latest figures show the total costs relating to the oil spill have now reached $55bn (£35.8bn).

Today Programme
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If global business confidence begins to ease, UK businesses may cut investment and thus entrench a slowdown, warns Chris Williamson of Markit. He tells Today it’s therefore up to policymakers to reassure businesses that they have the policy levers to cope with a slowdown. The problem is that businesses aren’t convinced the Bank of England, for one, has much power to do anything to prevent the global slowdown affecting  the UK economy. 

If the GDP figure for the third quarter comes in below 0.5%  - perhaps at 0.2% - there may be "some scary headlines about the economic falling off the edge of a cliff", Mr Williamson says. But he believes there is enough resilience in the economy to cope with the current slowdown.

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The impact of the fall in oil prices in the past 15 months or so is also pretty evident in BP's latest figures. Profits from its upstream business - that's oil exploration and extraction to you and me - was just $743m (£484m). That's still a big sum but compared to the $3.3bn BP made in profit last year, the scaling-back of its operations becomes pretty clear. 

Thankfully for BP, its oil refinery business - "downstream" operations turning crude oil and the like into petrol among other things - had a great three months, with profits doubling from $1.2bn last year to $2.5bn this year.

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Seems that TalkTalk is maintaining its hard line on allowing customers to get out of their contracts in the wake of last week's cyber attack. The telecoms company says it will only waive termination fees "in the unlikely event that money is stolen from a customer’s bank account as a direct result of the cyber-attack (rather than as a result of any other information given out by a customer)" on a case-by-case basis. Something of a PR fail perhaps?

BBC business editor Kamal Ahmed tweets: