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Banco Santander of Spain is using the down market to snap up some UK assets on the cheap. It has announced the acquisition of Alliance & Leicester, the former building society which demutualised in 1997, for £1.3 billion ($2.6 billion)
Despite speculations of other bank mergers in Europe, few have occurred as many European banks [...]

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According to the Irish Independent, the recent fall in Irish bank shares is due to a loss of faith in their bad debt provisions. On Tuesday, Bank of Ireland fell 14%, the largest amount in 20 years.

After last week’s dive in their share prices, the Irish banks are under pressure as never before. [...]

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See my list of Bankrupt global financial institutions for past news on IndyMac and other bankrupt financial institutions.
This is a very big deal. It seems that the financial crisis has reached fever pitch now. Given the week we just went through, I would not be surprised to see some more volatility on Monday.
IndyMac Bancorp [...]

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Earlier this morning, I read about the bailout of Roskilde Bank in Denmark through the Sydney Morning Herald.
Roskilde Bank, whose shares performed the worst last year among the Nordic region’s 86 financial companies, became the first Danish lender to be bailed out by the central bank since the subprime crisis started.
The bank found [...]

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The FT reports:
Citigroup is close to agreeing a sale of its German retail banking operations to Credit Mutuel for between €3bn and €5bn, after the French bank outbid Deutsche Bank in a close race, according to bankers close to the companies.
The deal has not yet been finalised and could still collapse but if [...]

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This is a big story coming from the Swiss German-language paper Sonntagszeitung. I originally saw this story in a derivative report from MarketWatch and then again at Calculated Risk. It’s not getting enough play as yet in the English-language press, perhaps because no one has translated the full story.
The long and short here [...]

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UBS has announced that it expects further massive hits from the credit crisis and subprime meltdown to affect its quarterly earnings to be released soon. However, after raising a huge amount of equity capital, the company is well-capitalised enough to weather the storm. They ned not raise further capital as their Tier 1 [...]

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Fortis, the Dutch-Belgian banking giant under pressure to shed assets because of the credit crisis, has disposed of part of its ABN Amro acquisition. Deutsche Bank has acquired the assets for 709 million Euros, according to a report in the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad.
The Belgian-Dutch group Fortis sold parts of ABN Amro in the Netherlands [...]

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The Vancouver Sun is on a roll today. They have another post on ICBC that makes for interesting reading. Frankly, I don’t know what to make of it. But it makes for a good read.
Chinese bank has market cap twice that of JPMorgan
First, the article starts off stating that the head of [...]

Troubled regional Financial Fifth Third is looking to sell assets along with cutting its dividend and raising capital in order to shore up its balance sheet. The company announced it was looking into asset sales when it announced its dividend cut and capital raising intentions. However, Barron’s has a piece today speculating on just which assets those could be.