Britain’s “too-big-to-fail” banking groups could be forced to hoard billions of pounds of extra capital as an insurance against future financial crises, after Alistair Darling decided against splitting them up. The chancellor is expected to announce next month that banks such as HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group and Barclays could be forced [...]
Customers taking out new mortgages with Nationwide will no longer revert to its market-leading standard variable Rate once their deal comes to an end. Existing customers on the Nationwide’s variable Rate home loan, called the BMR, are guaranteed to pay no more than 2 per cent above the Bank Rate, currently at 0.5 per cent. [...]
• ‘Credit is going to get worse,’ says under-fire chief Ken Lewis • $4.2bn profit beefed up by one-off gains • BoA and Citigroup’s shares slump Discontent over losses arising from Merrill Lynch has prompted a movement to oust Bank of America’s chief executive, Ken Lewis. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters The embattled US financial services group [...]
Estate agents are warning that the higher taxes introduced in this week’s Budget could increase the pressure on house Prices, as buyers at the top end of the market decide to live elsewhere. Many buyers of multi- million pound properties earn enough to be hit by the higher rate of income tax from next year. [...]
If you are one of the millions of people who have to go through life with bad credit, you know how hard it can be. Landlords won’t rent you the apartment you want. Car dealers chuckle when they see Your credit report. And you can forget about buying a house anytime in the foreseeable future. [...]
Annual public borrowing is set to rocket to almost £175bn over the next two years, Alistair Darling, the chancellor, is expected to announce in next week’s Budget. At more than 12 per cent of expected national income in the next financial year, this would be the worst deficit since the second world war. Ahead of [...]
New lending for home purchases picked up slightly in February but remains only about a third of the average activity for that month seen during the peak years of the housing boom between 2002 and 2007, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders. There were 24,300 house purchase loans during February, according to the CML, [...]
Barclays is likely to face more tough questions from shareholders over its decision to sell iShares after the buyer said it would look to float the exchange-traded funds business as soon as stock markets recovered. CVC Capital Partners, the private equity group that has agreed to buy iShares for $4.2bn (£2.9bn) said the highly profitable [...]
Halifax and Bank of Scotland are offering new mortgage deals to existing customers who have no equity in their homes – in a clear break from the trend of lenders demanding large deposits. The lenders, part of Lloyds Banking Group, are discreetly extending the maximum loan-to-value (LTV) on some of their new mortgage deals to [...]
HSBC has set aside £1bn ($1.4bn) to lend to homebuyers who have cash deposits of 10 per cent, in a sign that lenders are showing a greater willingness to offer riskier mortgages. The bank is poised to launch a number of deals that will lend up to 90 per cent of a property’s value. While [...]
