Toll Brothers, the largest U.S. luxury home builder, said on Tuesday it expects to report a 30 percent drop in home-building revenue for the quarter ended April 30.

France's biggest retail bank, Credit Agricole, announced a 5.9 billion euros ($9.1 billion) rights issue to shore up its capital after further writedowns at its Calyon investment bank, sending its shares down sharply.

New York Insurance Superintendent Eric Dinallo said it may make sense to discuss regulating certain segments of the credit derivatives market as if they were insurance products.

MBIA, the world's largest bond insurer, posted a quarterly loss of $2.4 billion on Monday as it took charges on billions of dollars of exposure to bonds linked to subprime mortgages.

HSBC writes down $3.2 billion in bad debt and says 5% of US mortages are 2-months or more overdue. But profit, shares rise.

A California man who has defaulted on nine homes and expects banks to foreclose on all of them, forcing him into bankruptcy, says he now considers it a mistake to have invested in the real estate market.

The White House Friday set out terms for a possible deal on a housing market rescue plan, as a sweeping package backed by the House was on its way to an uncertain greeting in the Senate

The global imbalances story is well documented. The spend thrift United States has borrowed trillions at a government and consumer level whilst cash rich economies in Asia and the Middle East have been more than willing to fund the spending spree

While there is still debate over whether now is the right time to buy a house, there are other opportunities to make a profit in real estate.

Fannie Mae priced $4.5 billion of securities on Thursday to shore up the balance sheet of the biggest provider of financing for U.S. home loans as it grapples with the worst housing slump in decades.

Citigroup, the largest U.S. bank, said Friday said it aims to shed $400 billion of assets over the next two to three years, in a drive to become more efficient.

Two billion dollars was pulled out of UBS's wealth management division in the first quarter. It's difficult to say how much of the loss stemmed from the subprime crisis, but smaller banks in Switzerland have been picking up business from the troubled market leader.

The battered housing market has steadied and is ready to bounce back off an inevitable pullback from its boom times in the earlier part of the decade, said Ron Peltier, the CEO at Warren Buffett's Homeservices of America real estate company.

Wall Street seems to have concluded that the worst of the credit crisis is over and investors are looking to better economic times ahead, but Main Street is sending the opposite signal.

This is a timeline of the European Central Bank's rate decisions from 2007 to date.