business - "credit"

A EUROPEAN credit card brand to rival the US giants Visa and Mastercard is being developed by French and German banks, including BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Deutsche Bank,

London shops are proving resilient in the face of the credit crunch as tourists splash out on luxury goods.

Alistair Darling will unveil an unprecedented scheme to offer £50 billion in taxpayer-backed loans to high street mortgage lenders today in an attempt to solve the credit crisis.

LONDON -- The Bank of England will unveil on Monday a plan to swap government bonds for commercial banks' mortgage debt in an effort to unblock the home loan market and ease the effects of the credit ...

Britain’s top 350 companies plan to cut spending and jobs and to dispose of assets as they struggle to cope with the credit crisis, but only a few are considering cutting dividends, according to a survey by Deloitte, the accounting firm.Deloitte interviewed finance directors of British companies with a combined market capitalisation of almost £100 billion and found that credit conditions had worsened in this year’s first quarter, even when compared with the depths of the credit crunch in the second half of last year. About 73 per cent of finance directors said that credit was more expensive, up from 64 per cent last December.Sixty-two per cent said that credit had become more difficult to secure, up from 48 per cent last September.Ian Stewart, associate director of Deloitte Research, said, however, that finance directors continued to prefer bank loans to raising cash via rights issues or bond issues. “Debt markets are, for a lot of companies,

As the economy deteriorates, what started off as a problem on US sub-prime will morph into losses on prime US mortgages - and loans of all types -in the UK as well.

Now is certainly a risky time to buy. Leading investment bank Morgan Stanley reckons that 1.2 million families could be plunged into negative equity in the next two years as house prices fall by as much as 25%. Experian, Britain's leading credit reference company, has just released a map of 'negative equity hotspots'. If you're a homeowner in Glasgow, Manchester, south-east London or Birmingham, you're more likely than most to be among the 75,000 households Experian predict will go into negative equity this year.

Most US stocks fell Monday after bank of america reported a sharp drop in earnings, sparking fears that the country's credit crisis may not be over just yet.

Credit reporting service Equifax Inc. reaffirmed its 2008 earnings and revenue guidance on Monday, after reporting that first-quarter earnings fell 5 percent due to expenses related to its 2007 acquisition of Talx Corp.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 By our correspondent LAHORE: The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has approved a credit line of Rs25 billion to the Pakistan Agricultural Storage and Supplies Corporation (PA...