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Home prices  in London’s wealthiest neighborhoods fell on a monthly basis for the first time in four years as uncertainty over property taxes and national elections next year deterred buyers. Values in the 13 neighborhoods including Chelsea and Mayfair that Knight Frank LLP defines as prime central London declined 0.2 percent in November from October, the first drop since October 2010, the broker said in a report today. London’s luxury-home market is running out of steam after outperforming the rest of the U.K. since 2009. The opposition Labour Party  plans to raise 1.2 billion pounds ($1.9 billion) from an annual tax on homes valued at more than 2 million pounds if it wins the election next year. Labour and Prime Minister  David Cameron ’s Conservative Party  were tied with 31 percent support in a YouGov/Sun poll published Nov. 28. “It is difficult to rank individual reasons for the decline in order of importance, but anecdotally they appear to include the looming U.K. general

Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC)  targets black and Latino borrowers for more costly home loans than their white counterparts in the  Chicago  area, helping to prolong a local and national foreclosure crisis, the biggest county in  Illinois  said. Cook County, which has a population of more than 5 million and includes the third-biggest U.S. city, accused the bank of engaging in predatory lending in a complaint filed today in Chicago federal court, following similar efforts by municipal governments in Los Angeles and Miami. The bank’s tactics start at home-loan origination and continue through refinancing and foreclosure, the country said, a process its lawyers summarized in the complaint as “equity stripping.” The process may have involved as many as 26,000 loans, the county said. “Equity stripping is an abusive form of ‘asset based lending’ that maximizes lender profits based on the value of the underlying asset and onerous loan terms, while in disregard for a borrower’s ability to

For the first time in  five years , $2 gasoline is making a comeback in some areas of the U.S., just in time for the Dec. 25 Christmas holiday. Retail stations scattered across the U.S. South and Midwest are about 20 cents shy of the $2-a-gallon mark. In New York, gasoline futures slid more than 13 cents Nov. 27 after OPEC failed to cut oil production to stem a glut. That decline alone could drag down pump prices by as much as 20 cents a gallon,  Michael Green , a spokesman for the Heathrow, Florida-based motoring club AAA, said yesterday by phone. “We could see the cheapest 1 percent of stations get within a few pennies of $1.99 over the next two weeks,” Patrick DeHaan, a senior petroleum analyst at GasBuddy Organization Inc., said yesterday by phone from  Chicago . “We’ll see at least one station in the nation at $2 by Christmas. And that’s not really a prediction at all. That’s more like a certainty.” The motor fuel has slid by almost a dollar a gallon in the U.S. from this

Oil plunged below $70 a barrel for the first time since 2010, leading a selloff in commodities  and energy shares. Treasuries advanced and the dollar reached a five-year high, while retailers rose amid Black Friday sales. West Texas Intermediate tumbled 10 percent to $66.15 for the biggest drop in more than five years. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot  Index  climbed to a five-year high as of 3:24 p.m. in New York, while gold sank 1.8 percent. Yields on 10-year Treasuries dropped 8 basis points to the lowest in more than five weeks, and Japan’s two-year rates turned negative for the first time. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index  dropped  0.3 percent and the Russell 2000 Index fell 1.5 percent, as U.S. markets reopened after the Thanksgiving holiday. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries kept its production ceiling unchanged, underscoring the price war in the crude market and challenge to U.S. shale drillers. The rout in oil is damping inflation, with price growth slowing i

Canada ’s biggest energy producers now face the same prospects of shrinking budgets and declining profit as their smaller rivals as prices drop for what’s already the world’s cheapest oil. Producers including  Suncor Energy Inc. (SU)  and  Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (CNQ) , which each fell the most in at least three years yesterday, operate in one of the most expensive places on earth to produce oil. If crude prices continue sinking following OPEC’s decision not to cut global oil supplies, Canada’s producers big and small will have to tighten their belts to prepare for declining profits. “This is a pretty big shock,” said Justin Bouchard, an analyst at Desjardins Securities Inc. in Calgary. “There’s no question there’s going to be a slowdown. Even the big guys will have to look at their  capital spending  plans.” Western Canada Select, the Canadian benchmark, has lost more than a third of its value since June, in step with declines for West Texas Intermediate and the inter

SABMiller Plc (SAB)  wants to strengthen its partnership with French drinks company Groupe Castel after forming the biggest  Coca-Cola Co. (KO)  bottler in  Africa  with the world’s largest soft-drink maker. Castel “are partners of ours, so what we’d want to do is show them the benefits of what we’re doing and try and see if we can work together on further opportunities,” Mark Bowman, managing director of SABMiller Africa, said in an interview in Johannesburg yesterday. The shares rose as much as 0.9 percent to 3,578.50 pence and was little changed as of 1:31 p.m. in  London . The maker of Grolsch and Peroni lagers yesterday agreed to combine bottling operations for non-alcoholic beverages with Coca-Cola in southern and  East Africa . Castel is often mentioned as a potential takeover target for the world’s second-largest brewer, which already owns 20 percent of the French winemaker. In turn, Castel has a 38 percent stake in SABMiller’s Africa business. SABMiller is increasing i