Existing shareholders of Bradford & Bingley - Insight Investment, Legal & General, M&G and Standard Life - will purchase £400m worth of new shares following the withdrawal of Texas Pacific Groups (TPG) offer to buy 23% of the British Bank.

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News that Taylor Wimpey failed to secure additional funding of some £500m, coupled with having to shed 900 jobs, sent the share price sharply down today. The shares ended the day down 25p (41%) at 35p, with intra-trading lows bottoming at a 57% loss. Read the rest of this entry »

The FTSE ended the week at 5,529.90 taking the fall for the first half of the year to 14.4%, the worst performance of the index since 1994 when it fell 14.6%. The continued sell-off of stocks came as oil hit $142.69 a barrel, news which reverberated around world markets. Analysts had initially predicted a poor start to the year, but with better prospects for the second half of 2008, however this optimism is waning and so it could be a bumpy ride all the way in to 2009.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall secured just under 10% of the votes from Tesco shareholders at the company’s AGM in a propsal to improve the welfare standards for chickens. Read the rest of this entry »

The Bradford & Bingley, Co-operative bank and First Direct have today raised the cost of their fixed rate mortgages as Banks find it increasingly difficult to raise finance to fund mortgage deals. The Co-op saw the biggest rise as they increased their rates between 0.7% and 0.9%. The move by these three banks now takes the average cost of a fixed rate mortgage to over 7%. Read the rest of this entry »

HBOS’s £4bn rights issue looks under pressure as once again the shares dipped below the 275p issue price. UBS has raised concerns that the Banks mortgage arrears will increase over the second half of the year. Also a US hedge fund has declared its short position in the stock, showing that it has bet that the share price will fall. Read the rest of this entry »

The Governor of the Bank of England has warned that consumer inflation could top 4% this year as increases in food and energy costs continue to push up inflation. Mervyn King was speaking after the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose by 3.3% in May. Read the rest of this entry »