Midweek View: The United States is not only not saving nuts, it's eating the ones left over from the last winter

Santander loses £52m from bid

Admiralty Arch in £60m hotel deal

Mitt Romney has ripped into Republican rival Newt Gingrich attacking what he said was the former speaker of the House of Representatives' disgraced exit and subsequent work as a Washington influence peddler.

Shares in Zynga, the online games company behind the Facebook favourite Farmville, fell 5 per cent on their first day of trading on Friday.

This was a good week for bank bashing.

Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and HSBC were among 17 giant banks sued last night by a US government agency, seeking billions of dollars in compensation over their packaging and selling of mortgage bonds in the run-up to the credit crisis.

Bank of America, the US financial giant which acquired Countrywide, the nation's largest subprime mortgage lender, at the peak of the credit crunch, will pay $8.5bn (£5.2bn) in the biggest-ever settlement of claims over toxic mortgage bonds.

New US regulations designed to make financial markets safer and prevent a repeat of the credit crisis could in fact kill off a major part of the secondary market in loans and leave housing finance reliant on government support forever, representatives for Wall Street's major firms are warning.

The former chief executives of the US mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could become the next senior figures facing fraud charges, as regulators pursue wrongdoing in the lead up to the credit crisis.

Withdrawing federal government support for the US mortgage market could wreck the economy and leave US house prices moribund for years, a leading bond fund manager has warned the Obama administration.