Tonight:
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Wall Street's consolidation round continued apace tonight ahead of the Congress vote on a $700 billion deal.
As Congressmen assembled to debate whether Hank Paulson's controversial bill to bailout the banks should be passed, the historic Wells Fargo bank agreed to buy America's fourth biggest bank, Wachovia, for $15 billion.
The deal scuppered an earlier agreed move in which Citigroup agreed to bail out Wachovia earlier in the week.
It came just hours before the crucial Congress vote, which is expected to deliver a result later this evening. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was due to put the issue to the ballot at about 5pm London time.
Commentators were still describing the vote as "too close to call" although US shares rallied strongly suggesting markets were optimistic about a "Yes".
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 95.8 at 10,578.7 despite grim figures on US employment numbers, which showed the biggest job losses for five and a half years.
Analysts said the extent of the credit crunch's impact on the "real" economy highlighted in the report could serve to spur the naysayers in Congress to change their minds.
The Wells Fargo bid values Wachovia at $15.1 billion and immediately pepped up stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic on the view that there remains enough value in troubled banks to attract competing takeover bids.
Wells Fargo, the country's third-largest bank, said the agreed deal would take place without the US government having to provide any financial support or guarantees.
On Monday, Wachovia agreed to be taken over by Citigroup in a deal forced upon it by the Bush administration and valuing it at just over $2 billion. The US government effectively said it would absorb any losses in the deal over an agreed limit of £42 billion.
The Citigroup deal was worth little more than $1 per Wachovia share. The Wells Fargo one is worth $7 a share. Citi and Wells Fargo were locked in negotiations with the government and Wachovia over the weekend.
Wells, based in San Francisco, said it expects to spend up to $10 billion on merger and integration costs and that it will be raising $20 billion through issuing new shares.
Today's deal creates the biggest coast-to-coast bank in the US.
