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Barclays alerted U.S. regulators as far back as 2007 to concerns that banks were rigging benchmark interest rates, according to documents released on Friday, but policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic did not appear to take decisive action, underscoring the chaos of the financial crisis.

The nation's largest mortgage lender said revenue from mortgage banking jumped almost 80% and consumers borrowed more on their credit cards. But it called the economic recovery uneven.

The Bank of England confirmed on Friday it had received U.S. recommendations to overhaul the Libor benchmark at the heart of a global rate-rigging scandal, saying it had passed them on to the banking group responsible for the rate... The Bank of England confirmed on Friday it had received U.S. recommendations to overhaul the Libor benchmark at the heart of a global rate-rigging scandal, saying it had passed them on to the banking group responsible for the rate.

JPMorgan Chase said Friday that a bad trade had cost the bank $5.8 billion this year, almost triple its original estimate, and raised the prospect that traders had improperly tried to conceal the blunder.

Twelve global banks that have been publicly linked to the Libor rate-rigging scandal face as much as $22bn in combined regulatory penalties and damages to investors and counterparties, according to Morgan Stanley estimates.

Wells Fargo Bank will pay at least $175 million to settle accusations that it discriminated against African-American and Hispanic borrowers in violation of fair-lending laws, the Justice Department announced Thursday.

Facebook announced that it is testing an online-banking service with Australia's Commonwealth Bank expected to debut this year. The new system lets people make payments to other Facebook users, and will become a test of how well Facebook can handle the deep-science realities of financial privacy and security.

Drug money has a way of sprawling. And some of it may have reached Bank of America.A federal probe into Los Zetas, a Mexican drug cartel, claims that the group has been laundering money through accounts at BofA, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal.

Across the country, banks and other lenders are still being stingy in providing credit to ordinary consumers. Only the most financially stable of Americans can secure mortgages. Small businesses are having trouble getting loans. Credit card access is restricted.

Small banks still owe $11 billion of taxpayer money under TARP, and the government is threatening to unload its stakes in them at big discounts to new investors. Nearly four years after Washington bailed out Wall Street, small banks have yet to repay $11 billion of taxpayer money.