Lord Mandelson has reiterated that the government has no plans to nationalise the banking sector.
His comments come two days after the government increased its stake in Lloyd Banking Group to 65% from 43%.

So determined was the pro-Euro lobby to bury Emu-sceptics, it cast aspersions on the character of those who took an opposing view.
More recently, the same cowardly device has been used by deranged environmentalists. Anyone who dares to suggest “global warming” may not exist – that temperature changes could be driven by long-term climatic cycles rather than human activities – is dubbed a “denier”.

One of the biggest Wall Street banks has warned investors not to bet on Ireland defaulting on its debt, as its financial position remains “remarkably strong” despite the banking crisis and economic downturn.
JP Morgan bond analysts pointed out in a note to clients this week, that many other eurozone countries “have significantly worse public sector debt to gross domestic product (GDP) ratios”.

Does anybody in the federal government know or could know “who, what, where and when” of the massive, complex, vertical, horizontal, global collapse of Wall Street and its planetary tentacles in over 100 countries abroad? Step forward if you exist! Uncle Sam needs you!

Is the multi-million dollar bailout of this financial mess and house of cards, this phantom wealth mummy hitting air beyond the federal governments’ salvage capability?

When Europe’s central banks told the gold market five years ago that they would renew their pact to cap their bullion sales, the sector breathed a sigh of relief. Today, gold prices are double their 2004 level and central bank sales far smaller, but the market is still hoping that the Central Bank Gold Agreement will be renewed again.
The current CBGA, which caps sales at 500 tonnes a year, expires in late September, but the banks have in the past announced the terms of a new agreement in March and there is an expectation in the market that a statement could come soon.

House prices have tumbled a long way since their peak in the autumn of 2007 – by a fifth, in fact.
Much has been made of the fact that they are now roughly back in line with their long-term average, at around £148,000. But that is beside the point – house prices never rise in line with their long-term average: they either grow faster than it or slower, or simply fall – as is now happening.

Cazenove, has charged fees close to £700 million in return for holding the hands of 11 major companies which have raised £21 billion of new money in just the first two months of 2009, the busiest flood of rights issues in years.
While the deluge of financing fees will help the books of the investment banks and stockbrokers and their coterie of lawyer and accountant advisers, the price being charged for the work is causing alarm.

UK sub-prime lender Cattles says there has been a failure of internal accounting controls at the firm and it is suspending three senior managers.
It said that it had uncovered problems in the ways it accounts for bad loans.

For Clarissa Young, a highly qualified, articulate 36-year-old from Ascot in Berkshire, waking up each morning in a bunk bed in her parents’ spare room is not where she envisaged being at this stage in life, when most of her friends are married with their own children in bunk beds.
“To make matters more laughable, when my 32-year-old brother Jared came home over Christmas, he had to sleep in the top bunk, so there we both were, feeling we’d regressed back to childhood,” says Clarissa, who finds herself one of the “boomerang generation”: people in their 20s or even 30s who, usually thwarted by lack of mortgages, precarious careers or the rising cost of living, move back home with their parents.

The research claimed the number of rental properties advertised on their portal has almost doubled, rising 8pc in the last month alone.
But even with the increase in enquiries, with visitors to the site’s rental list rising by 22pc, supply still outstrips demand.