Summary
THE first salvoes in a new home-loan price war were fired last week when HSBC launched a groundbreaking 1.99 per cent mortgage deal. Competitors are expected to follow with an autumn mortgage bonanza, or risk being blamed for preventing a housing market recovery.
Banks' lending strategies for 2009 will come under scrutiny at the end of this year, after suffering 12 months of pressure from politicians to increase advances to families. If evidence emerges that lenders deliberately withheld finance, they will face tough questioning, particularly those institutions owned in part or wholly by taxpayers.See the full content of this document
Extract
Banks Still Holding Back Mortgages
Yet banks granted just 194,000 loans for the first six months of the year, compared with 516,000 for all of 2008. This figure was half the long-running average of the previous decade. Ba...
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