Leaving aside the mortgage banks for the moment, another sector under the cosh today is housebuilding.
The damage was done by the Bank of England, which hinted in its inflation report that it is in no hurry to reduce interest rates further. So Persimmon lost 19.5p to 726p and Taylor Wimpey fell 4.8p to 173.1p.
Back at the banks, Bradford & Bingley's surprise write-off sent its shares tumbling by 23% to a new low of 187p. Northern Rock lost 9.5p to 95.5p on growing worries that it will end up being nationalised, while Alliance & Leicester was caught in the slipstream and fell 42p to 559p.
Overall, the FTSE 100 lost 29.9 points to 5880.1, although the damage would have been worse if not for a bright start on Wall Street. The US market was buoyed - probably wrongly - by slightly better than expected retail sales figures for January. Optimists took this as a sign that the country could avoid recession. Most observers, however, were unconvinced.
A survey of UK fund managers by Merrill Lynch was closer to the bear than the bull position. It found that institutional investors are now more risk averse than they have been for seven years. About 30% of the panel said they had hedged against further falls in equities over the next three months.
A net 41% of fund managers were overweight in cash, the highest level since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
"Risk aversion is so extreme and cash levels are so high that the challenge now is to identify the catalyst that prompts money to return to the stock market," said David Bowers, independent consultant to Merrill Lynch. "While it's not clear what that catalyst will be, there's no doubt that the ability to draw a line under the credit crunch will be an important step."
And - as B&B has shown - there is no sign yet of that line being drawn.
