Word: northerner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Monday morning is never a quiet time for a Main Street bank. At branches of Northern Rock, a British lender, the lines outside extend even further than usual. But it's not exactly welcome business. Savers flooding the Newcastle-based bank on Monday joined the thousands to have withdrawn their cash from Northern Rock in recent days. So far, customers have emptied the bank of around $4 billion, or 8% of its deposit base...
...panic? Late Thursday, it emerged that the Bank of England had agreed emergency credit for Northern Rock, Britain's fifth-largest mortgage provider and the U.K.'s first bank to be left reeling from the global credit crunch. Jitters in the credit markets were triggered by the collapse of a U.S. subprime mortgage sector built on lending to home buyers with poor credit histories. With that risky debt having been spliced, repackaged and flogged to banks around the world, financial institutions are less keen to lend each other cash. And when they do, they're charging each other more...
...Northern Rock's problem: Its modest savings business compared to its mortgage lending arm means it leans on those wholesale credit markets for a larger share of its funding than its rivals. With that well drying up, it "hits them disproportionately," says Alex Potter, an analyst at Collins Stewart in London...
...share price in freefall, a takeover is another potential outcome. "Who would be doing it?" asks Justin Urquhart Stewart at Seven Investment Management in London: "Anyone wishing to buy that asset book at discounted value." And further fallout from the squeeze on credit could yet follow in the U.K. Northern Rock rivals Alliance and Leicester and HBoS similarly rely on liquid credit markets, albeit to a degree that's "smaller in magnitude," Collins Stewart's Potter wrote in a research note. Northern Rock, in other words, may not be the last financial institution to find itself in a hard place...
...breaks, in an attempt to entice disgruntled conservatives back to the party fold. He has also threatened to take Greeks on a fresh trip to the polls if his New Democracy party fails to win an outright majority. "I understand there is bitterness," Karamanlis told an election rally in northern Greece. "But this in not the time for a negative vote." A non-majority winner in Sunday's polls, he warned, would create a "political impasse" and "paralysis" for the country...