4. Martin Blessing, chief executive of Germany's second biggest lender, Commerzbank, is to step down next October as the bank reported third quarter profit that beats estimates.
German banks alone need to raise €13.1bn (£11.2bn) extra capital, with the country's second biggest lender, Commerzbank, widely expected to ask for a further bailout by Berlin.
It demutualised in 1997 and became Northern Rock, which sponsored Newcastle United and became the fifth biggest lender in the UK market.
DealBook » Greek Lender Appeals for Emergency Liquidity Assistance | Piraeus Bank, Greece's fourth biggest lender, has appealed for funding from the nation's central bank, suggesting that its reserves have dipped below levels acceptable to the European Central Bank, The Financial Times reports.
But in the main, the losses stemmed from more direct worries about the housing market.The trouble started with New Century, which had become the nation's second biggest lender to would-be homeowners with dodgy credit histories or little cash for a down payment.
Commerzbank, Germany's second biggest lender, recently announced it was closing its real estate and ship finance units.
Around 40% of mortgages have disappeared since last summer and last week HSBC's internet and phone arm First Direct became the first big lender to pull out of the market.
On the same day that all 50 state attorneys general announced that they would investigate foreclosure practices, JPMorgan Chase & Company became the first big lender to acknowledge that it had stopped using Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS, for foreclosures.
While GMAC is the first big lender to publicly acknowledge that its practices might have been improper, defense lawyers and consumer advocates have long argued that numerous lenders have used inaccurate or incomplete documents to remove delinquent owners from their houses.
Bank of China, the nation's second- biggest lender, may raise as much as $8 billion in a Hong Kong initial public offering in June after shelving plans for a simultaneous sale in Shanghai, Bloomberg News reported.
