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...target - demand in Britain's housing market has been choked. House prices fell 1.7% last month, according to Halifax, a major mortgage lender, and a total of 8.8% over the past year. That's hit Britain's construction business hard. Shares in Taylor Wimpey, the U.K.'s largest house builder, have fallen more than 80% over the past 12 months. The construction downturn slowed growth in Britain to an anemic 0.2% in the second quarter of this year, the lowest quarter-on-quarter rate for three years...
...Dutch banks confessed to being hit by their exposure to soured U.S. sub-prime mortgages, an RBS-led consortium was closing in on its eventual $100 billion buy-out of Dutch rival ABN Amro, the banking industry's biggest ever takeover. One year on, and Britain's second-largest lender is still making news - though these days it's much less welcome. On August 8, RBS announced it had tumbled to a $1.33 billion loss in the first half of this year - a massive drop from the $9.6 billion profit it recorded in the first six months...
...Right now, it's a familiar place to many of Britain's banks. On August 7, rival Barclays added $5.4 billion to the enormous sums British lenders have written off amid the credit crisis; London-based HSBC, Europe's largest bank, made a similar contribution a few days earlier. For banks across Europe, as for their U.S. counterparts, 2008 is proving painfully difficult. Globally, banks could write down as much as $450 billion more over the next three to four years, according to research from Deutsche Bank. Lenders, it says, are short of funds equivalent to 4% of their balance...
...Great Wall, China's next establishment gathered to welcome their foreign friends. Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin are, as one foreign press story put it last year, are the "it" couple among China's new entrepreneurs. Husband and wife, both in their mid forties, they run SOHO China, the largest private property developers in Beijing, and a company known for its sleek, stylish properties. On Saturday night, at a resort development at the Wall known as "the Commune,'' Pan and Zhang, his elegant CEO/spouse, hosted 1,000 of their closest friends. Robin Li, the young CEO of Baidu, China...
...James P. Currier, founder and chairman of Medpedia—what aims to become the world's largest collaborative online encyclopedia of medicine and health—recalls scouring the Web for medical information while comforting a sick child or two. Even for a tech-savvy entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, readily-accessible, credible information was not easy to find online...