| Cheap loans best for car finance
Britons are set to spend billions on new cars over the next six months, and cheap loans could be the best way of financing this. New figures from Sainsbury's Bank show 7.65 million people intend to buy a car between March 2007 and August this year, and 26 per cent of them plan to fund part of this purchase with a cheap loan. "Our findings estimate that of the total amount of money that will be spent on buying vehicles, around 15.8 per cent will be financed through personal loans, which equates to around £8.41 billion," said Steven Baillie, Sainsbury's Bank loans manager. "Although this represents a 33 per cent drop in the total planned for car purchase loans, it's actually more important than ever for people to shop around due to heightened competition in the market." Overall the Sainsbury's Bank survey shows 430,000 fewer people are planning to buy a car in the next six months than in the last six months, spending £16.2 billion less.
Wellcome Trust and Hands team up for Alliance Boots bid
The sale of Alliance Boots has taken a step closer to a £12 billion competitive auction after the Wellcome Trust joined forces with Terra Firma to ask Britain's biggest chain of chemists to open its books to a rival bidder. The charity and the private equity firm have put in a combined request to carry out due diligence. They expect a response by the end of this week. An approach would pit them against a bid consortium of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), the global private equity group, and Stefano Pessina, the Alliance Boots deputy chairman and its largest shareholder. Alliance Boots is expected to make a decision by Friday on whether to accede to the latest request for access to its books, even though the new stalkers have not yet put together financing, which needs to top KKR's offer of £11.4 billion.
Around the Sports Italia Hellenic League
HOUNSLOW BOROUGH, who withdrew from the Sport Italia Hellenic League this week after a mass of debts forced them to fold, are going out of business. Chairman Stefan Poulos revealed: "It's the end for us. The Middlesex FA suspended us for the third time on Monday because our fines had still not been paid. We owed them £1,270 and the Hellenic League £1,716, in fines, fees and expenses for various rule breaches over recent months. "We had 10 home games still to play which would have cost us £322 each in ground hire from Bedfont and match officials fees of £97 so that would have totalled another £3,220. Raising a total of more than £6,000 was beyond us." Poulos, 63, an Isleworth mortgage adviser, added: "A sponsor had agreed to give the Middlesex FA £1,270 but the cheque was then stopped and we found ourselves suspended again.
Foreclosure wave bears down on immigrants
WASHINGTON - Immigrants are emerging as among the first victims of a growing wave of home foreclosures as mortgage lending problems multiply here and across the country. Nationally, 375,000 high-interest-rate loans were made to Hispanics in 2005, and nearly 73,000 of them are likely to go into foreclosure, said Aracely Panameno, director of Latino affairs for the Center for Responsible Lending. About 1.1 million homes in the United States are expected to go into foreclosure in the next six years, and many native-born Americans are likely to be stuck with burdensome loans. But immigrants are getting hit first in part because their incomes tend to be lower and many have lost construction jobs. Homeownership rates among immigrants surged in the first half of the decade, making their prosperity an economic success story.
|
