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A year after the Justice Department reached a $335 million deal with Bank of America Corp. to compensate minority borrowers for alleged discrimination, much remains to be done, according to a Wall Street Journal reported today. The department's settlement administrator just began notifying affected borrowers in November, about five months later than originally planned. Then, weeks after letters went out to more than 233,000 presumed victims, about 10 percent of those letters have been returned as undeliverable, according to Justice Department officials. U.S. officials had warned that it might take two years for eligible borrowers to receive money from the settlement, but they also expressed hope that checks could be mailed out sooner.

Banking regulators are close to a $10 billion settlement with 14 banks that would end the government’s efforts to hold lenders responsible for foreclosure abuses like faulty paperwork and excessive fees that may have led to evictions, the New York Times reported today. Under the settlement, a significant amount of the money, $3.75 billion, would go to people who have already lost their homes, making it potentially more generous to former homeowners than a broad-reaching pact in February between state attorneys general and five large banks. That set aside $1.5 billion in cash relief for Americans. Most of the relief in both agreements is meant for people who are struggling to stay in their homes and need the banks to reduce their payments or lower the amount of principal they owe. The $10 billion pact would be the latest in a series of settlements that regulators and law enforcement officials have reached with banks to hold them accountable for their role in the 2008 financial crisis that sent the housing market into the deepest slump since the Great Depression. As of early 2012, four million Americans had been foreclosed upon since the beginning of 2007.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., which is due to make a third payment to creditors in March, had $5.6 billion in free cash on Nov. 30, an increase of $1.1 billion during the month, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Cash that was restricted, or unavailable at Lehman and its affiliates was $13.7 billion, including $5.8 billion set aside for disputed claims, according to a post-bankruptcy report filed in court yesterday. The defunct investment bank, which has already paid creditors half of the $65 billion it aims to pay by 2016 or so, last month agreed to sell its Archstone Inc. unit for $6.5 billion to AvalonBay Communities Inc. and Sam Zell’s Equity Residential, scrapping plans for an initial public offering after a four-month slide in U.S. apartment stocks. Lehman also has been whittling down claims by some creditors, which would potentially add cash for distribution.

Personal-finance experts are warning consumers that a failure to pay off just a few dollars of their purchases on deferred-interest credit cards from Apple Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other big-name retailers can leave them with major finance charges later on, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The deferred-interest credit cards offered by those stores allow customers to pay for purchases interest-free for a set period. But borrowers who fail to pay off their initial purchases in full by the end of the promotional period must pay interest on the original amount that they charged—even the parts they have already paid off. The backdated interest is often at rates as high as 25 percent.

Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp.'s Merrill Lynch are among five firms that will pay $4.48 million to settle regulatory claims they used funds from municipal and state bond deals to pay lobbyists, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Local authorities were unfairly asked to reimburse payments that the firms made over five years to the California Public Securities Association, a lobbying group, to help influence the state, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), which oversees securities firms, said yesterday. The firms inadequately described the fees, wrapping them into bond- underwriting expenses, Finra said. The banks, also including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley, agreed to pay $3.35 million in fines and reimburse certain California bond issuers $1.13 million, according to the statement. Citigroup’s $1.28 million in sanctions were the largest, followed by Merrill’s $1.07 million.

American Airlines' pilot union warned that an American Airlines merger with US Airways Group Inc. may not occur during the AMR Corp. unit's bankruptcy unless pilot groups from the carriers agree on interim contract terms, Bloomberg News reported today. If an accord is not reached “in the very near future, in all likelihood there will be no merger before American Airlines exits restructuring,” said Keith Wilson, president of the Allied Pilots Association. The pilot groups, joined by executives from both carriers, began negotiating the accord earlier this month. American, which filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 29, 2011, has said it prefers to assess mergers after it leaves court protection. US Airways has been pushing for a tie-up since January.

The New York State regulator for MBIA Inc.'s insurance unit criticized the company for paying executives $11.4 million to stay on board for three more years, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. MBIA said on Wednesday that it is paying the cash bonuses to keep four executives with the company through December 2015. Its board approved compensation for Chief Financial Officer Chuck Chaplin, Chief Operating Officer William Fallon, Chief Legal Officer Ram Wertheim and Chief Portfolio Officer Anthony McKiernan that include the retention awards and 2 million shares of stock.

Deutsche Bank AG was sued in New York by Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg (LBBW), which accuses the German bank of fraud in the sale of $173 million in mortgage-backed securities in 2007, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Deutsche Bank engaged in "egregious fraud," selling securities that were riskier than promised and leading to losses, LBBW said in a complaint filed yesterday in New York State Supreme Court. LBBW, Germany’s biggest state-owned lender, said Deutsche Bank's misconduct resulted in "astounding" rates of default on loans underlying the securities.

High-frequency trading firms are fighting to fend off regulation as scrutiny of their practice of unleashing blizzards of orders coincides with repeated technical glitches in the markets, the Wall Street Journal reported today. As the firms work to convince policy makers their practices are benign or even beneficial, one of their primary tools has been research seeded by the industry itself, promoted by lobbying that has increased in recent years. Defenders say high-frequency trading keeps markets lubricated with a constant supply of buy and sell orders that enables all participants to trade more efficiently and get better pricing. Critics worry that the traders' order torrent makes markets more opaque, less stable and ultimately less fair. Concern has risen amid a lengthening list of unnerving market malfunctions: the "flash crash" free fall in May 2010, the bungled initial public offering in March of a computerized stock exchange, the poorly executed Facebook Inc. public offering in May on the Nasdaq Stock Market and Knight Capital Group Inc.'s August debacle.

Wells Fargo & Co. won its bid to throw out a judge's order that it pay California customers $203 million for manipulating debit card transactions to boost overdraft fees, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The decision, issued today by the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco, reverses a lower-court order requiring Wells Fargo to cease its practice of charging overdraft fees based on its posting in high-to-low order customers' debit-card transactions. The bank's practice is a "federally authorized pricing decision," the appeals court ruled.