Papers

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) today sold Angel Trains for £3.6bn to Babcock & Brown, the Australian investment group, The Times reports.

HBOS, the country's biggest lender, was last night desperately defending its fundraising plans after its shares slumped to record lows, putting its £4bn cash call under severe pressure, The Guardian reports.

Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, gave a stark warning yesterday that the financial excesses of recent years will lead to misery for homeowners, The Independent reports.

Investors have bet the Bank of England will have to raise interest rates as many as three times before the end of the year, The Telegraph reports.

The slide in house prices will continue for at least three years and crush the value of a home by almost 50% in real terms, according to a key index of property price futures, The Guardian reports.

Alistair Darling yesterday paved the way for the Treasury to bring in a group of high-powered City figures to oversee the Bank of England's policing of the markets and help to prevent a repeat of the Northern Rock fiasco, The Times reports.

The idea that the rest of the world can "decouple" itself from the slowdown affecting the United States is unrealistic, the head of president George W Bush's economic advisory team said today, The Guardian reports.

Britons' confidence in the economy has hit a new low, with almost half convinced the outlook for their finances and their job will deteriorate over the next six months, The Telegraph 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.

The Bank of England should raise borrowing costs to 5.25% at its meeting this week, says one of its leading former policy-makers, The Telegraph reports..