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AFP - Troubled mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac reported a shocking loss in the second quarter that bodes ill for the US taxpayer after the government's huge rescue package.

Reuters - Stocks rose on Wednesday, building on the previous day's big gains, as a further drop in oil prices and a reassuring outlook from Cisco Systems overshadowed persistent credit concerns.

AP - Wall Street logged another winning day Wednesday as a drop in oil prices and a better-than-expected profit report from technology bellwether Cisco Systems Inc. helped corral the market's worries about the financial sector.

Reuters - Morgan Stanley told thousands of clients this week that they will not be allowed to withdraw money on their home-equity credit lines, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday, citing a person familiar with the situation. Most of the clients had properties that have lost value, the agency reported, citing a person who declined to be identified.

AFP - The collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the United States and the subsequent global financial crisis has provoked the sharpest fall on world stock markets since the end of the Internet bubble in 2001-2002.

Reuters - The Treasury said on Tuesday it hired Morgan Stanley to advise it on whether housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are adequately capitalized as the government tries to determine how it would use its new powers to support the two companies.

Reuters - U.S. mortgage market giant Freddie Mac's chief executive dismissed internal warnings that could have protected the company from some of the financial problems now engulfing it, the New York Times said, citing more than two dozen current and former high-ranking executives and others.

Reuters - Wachovia Corp shares fell as much as 10.3 percent on Monday after an analyst said investors should sell the shares of the fourth-largest U.S. bank and avoid the pain likely to result from repairing a balance sheet bloated with mortgage and real estate loans.

AP - Wall Street fell Monday in an erratic session dominated by worries about inflation — which were somewhat soothed by a plunge in oil prices that took crude to its lowest level in three months.

Reuters - Europe's biggest bank HSBC Holdings said its first-half profit fell 28 percent, in line with analysts' forecasts, as a $14 billion hit on bad debts on U.S. home loans and asset writedowns countered strong Asian growth.

Reuters - Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc is in talks with prospective buyers, including BlackRock Inc, to sell mortgage assets and other hard-to-value securities, according to reports on Friday.

Reuters - Britain's financial watchdog has found no evidence that illegal dealing was behind an abrupt fall in the shares of mortgage lender HBOS in March, but warned it would not relax its surveillance of the market.

Reuters - Freddie Mac , the second-biggest provider of funding for U.S. residential mortgages, on Thursday said it is boosting incentives to mortgage servicing companies to help more borrowers renegotiate loans in an effort to curb rising delinquencies.