It may have left interest rates on hold last night, but the Federal Reserve isn’t done dishing out money. Just days after leaving Lehman Brothers to collapse, the Fed has ditched its concerns about moral hazard and stepped in to bail out insurance giant AIG, to the tune of $85bn.

Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE:FRE) collapsed because foreign bonn holders panicked and fled, says John Stepek in British financial magazine MoneyWeek. Now, the US government is crossing its fingers and hoping that the housing market picks up If matters improve, the government might even turn a profit on its stake in the toxic twins…

In the wake of the sub-prime crisis, there’s been a lot of nonsense talked about how the financial markets have proved unable to regulate themselves. Apparently intelligent people have been arguing that what we really need is greater government intervention in the markets.

How not to solve the financial crisis. The past really is sweeping back to haunt Gordon Brown. If you wrote the film script of his career, no one would believe it – it’s far too loaded with poetic justice to be true.

Why rents won’t rise enough to save buy-to-let landlords… Commercial property still has a long way to fall.

Who’s to blame for the collapse of house prices? Now that the housing market is clearly collapsing, many of the pundits who said that soaring prices were perfectly justified, are now scrabbling to find reasons why the current slump is a unique, unforeseeable and entirely new phenomenon.

Shares in Britain’s largest mortgage lender HBOS (HBOS) have been making the news for all the wrong reasons.

US hedge fund Harbinger Capital shorted HBOS stocks, revealing under new disclosure rules that it held a 3.3% short position, worth about 345 million pounds.

Lansdowne Partners and Meditor Capital Management also revealed short positions of less than 1% in the bank, according to a report by Thomson Reuters.