San Francisco's Wells Fargo & Co. has stopped offering a popular adjustable-rate “2/28” mortgage designed for home buyers with troubled borrowing histories, becoming the latest lender to curtail its exposure to the subprime market in response to regulatory and market pressures. Wells Fargo also dropped three other types of subprime mortgage products and launched a mobile banking service.
The Bancrofts
The family that controls publisher Dow Jones & Co. (DJ) is expected to decide within days whether it will relinquish its stake and let Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWS) buy the company for $5 billion. Members of the Bancroft family, who trace their ownership of The Wall Street Journal’s publisher to 1902, assembled for six hours to hash out whether to accept Murdoch’s offer.
