Banks, Federal Regulator | featured news

Bank earnings rose over the summer to their highest level in more than four years, while the number of troubled banks fell for the second straight quarter, federal regulators reported Tuesday.

Federal regulators charged a Citigroup unit with negligence Wednesday, saying it misled investors about an investment product it used to bet against them as the housing market deteriorated. Citigroup agreed to pay a settlement of $285 million, which will be distributed to investors, the Securities and Exchange Commission said.

Banks would be barred from trading for their own profit instead of their clients under a rule being proposed by federal regulators.

U.S. regulators on Friday announced the collapse of two more banks in Florida, one of the most failure-plagued states in the country this year.

A federal watchdog criticized federal regulators' oversight of executive pay packages for top officials at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in a report published Thursday. The top six executives at the mortgage giants earned $35 million in the last two years, according to the report from the inspector general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates the mortgage giants.

Major U.S. banks are about to get penalized for "critical deficiencies" and shortcomings in how they handled foreclosures, a top federal regulator said Thursday at a Senate Banking Committee hearing examining the Dodd-Frank Act six months after its congressional approval.

Federal regulators closed Bay National Bank of Baltimore, Md., the 87th U.S. bank to fail this year.

Federal regulators involved in the rescue of insurer AIG may have overpaid other banks when cutting a deal, a report says.