KeyCorp shares tumbled Friday, as investors punished the regional bank for slashing its dividend for the second time in five months and continued to flee financial stocks amid concerns about the stability of the sector.

Mortgage finance company Freddie Mac said Friday it received a noticed that it may lose its listing on the New York Stock Exchange because its share price has been under $1 for more than 30 days.

The number of new and resale homes sold in October and median prices, with annual percentage changes, in selected California counties:

Despite an increasingly uncertain economy, homebuyers in California kept snatching up foreclosed homes last month, dragging down the median home price by 34 percent from a year ago, a real estate tracking firm said Thursday.

New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli says the next victims of the mortgage foreclosure crisis are the people who have managed to hold onto their homes.

Mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are suspending foreclosures during the holiday season.

The head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp said Thursday she is optimistic the agency will be able to obtain money from the $700 billion bailout fund to launch its proposed home-loan modification program quickly.

Regulators in Virginia are the first nationwide to actively discourage real estate appraisers from using online systems that could allow unscrupulous agents and lenders to remove critical information from the appraisal report.

Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson outlined a plan Thursday to force mortgage lenders to negotiate with homeowners before foreclosing on their homes.

Foreclosure deeds spiked more than 24 percent between September and October in Massachusetts, but there were fewer petitions to foreclose, which is the first step in the process.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell is developing a bill to help struggling homeowners and renters, including a six-month moratorium on foreclosures.

The Department of Justice is investigating the mortgage lending practices of Golden West Financial Corp., the savings and loan bought by Wachovia Corp. for $24 billion at the height of the housing boom in 2006.

U.S. financial companies need an additional $1 trillion to $1.2 trillion in capital to restore confidence to the and improve liquidity, according to a Friedman, Billings, Ramsey analyst.

A U.S. Senate subcommittee is opening a probe into causes of the global financial crisis, focusing in part on whether bond-ratings firms, driven by conflicts of interest, boosted mortgage investments which have since collapsed, the Wall Street Journal said.

Sixteen people — including drug smugglers, real estate appraisers and a bank employee — hatched two multimillion-dollar mortgage fraud schemes involving overvalued suburban homes that were sometimes used as stash houses, authorities said.