The Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) is promising two-and-a-half million Bradford & Bingley (B&B) customers: Your money is safe.
Bradford & Bingley shares crashed 16% to 42p yesterday, dropping further below the 55p-a-share price of its £400m rights issue, as the City speculated that the buy-to-let lender is worthless, The Telegraph reports.
Resolution, the investment fund headed by Clive Cowdery, met with Bradford & Bingley advisers last night in an attempt to convince the mortgage bank to back its bid to take effective control, The Independent reports.
The City's biggest investment banks forced Bradford & Bingley to slash the price of its rights issue amid fears that demand for the £300m fundraising would be so low they would be left with millions of pounds worth of shares, The Guardian reports.
With less than two days to go before the Budget the housing industry has come out in force to lobby the Chancellor on Stamp Duty again.
Bradford & Bingley (B&B) says it believes interest rates will either stay at their current rate of 4.75% or see one more rise to 5% before beginning to fall again.
The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) has called for a fundamental reform of Stamp Duty, despite welcoming the increase in the initial threshold announced by the Chancellor last month
Robin Phipps, Legal & General group director UK, says today's deal with Bradford & Bingley offers an "alternative" business model to the standard multi-tie deals expected from depolarisation.
Borrowers are still largely unconcerned about the latest interest rate rise nor about a further rise, according to research by Bradford & Bingley .
Shares in Bradford & Bingley have soared this morning after the company announced it would sell off "non-core" businesses to focus on building up its own-branch network to boost sales of specialist and retail financial products.