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The U.S. government closed a chapter in financial-crisis history on Friday when it sold its remaining shares of Ally Financial Inc. and shuttered its auto-bailout program, ending the last major pieces of a $426 billion rescue package that saved a swath of U.S. companies but never won public support, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The Treasury Department said the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program has netted a small profit, returning $441.7 billion on the $426.4 billion invested in firms including Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp., General Motors Co., Chrysler and American International Group, Inc. That profit, unexpected at the time of the bailout’s inception, has been nonetheless overshadowed by criticism that the rescue program put Wall Street’s interests ahead of Main Street’s, a view that prompted Congress to outlaw future taxpayer bailouts as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law. About 35 smaller banks remain in the program, down from about 700 financial firms at the height of the program. Critics have also pointed to the possible costs of having such a large amount of government funds tied up for so long and to the risks assumed by the government with its bailouts.

Ally Financial disclosed on Thursday that it had received a Justice Department subpoena as part of an investigation “related to subprime automotive finance and related securitization activities,” the New York Times DealBook blog reported on Friday. The investigation is in addition to an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company, the former finance arm of General Motors, said on Oct. 31 that it had received a request for documents from the SEC in connection with that agency’s inquiry into subprime loans. Ally Financial is the latest company to come under the government’s scrutiny of the booming subprime auto market. Santander Consumer USA and General Motors Financial, the current finance arm of GM, have previously disclosed that they received Justice Department subpoenas as part of the inquiry. Federal prosecutors, led by the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, are looking at how lenders package and sell loans to investors.

The U.S. Department of Justice has begun a criminal investigation into the foreign exchange trading website Secureinvestment.com, which vanished last May 1 with as much as $1 billion from investors around the world, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The Financial and Capital Market Commission in Latvia is also probing the involvement of Latvian banks used by Secure Investment, says agency spokeswoman Elina Avotina. An investigator with the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York has interviewed Secure investors in the U.S. and Canada. Secure had claimed on its website that it traded more than $4.8 billion daily for at least 100,000 investors in 140 countries. The site said that its customers averaged net gains of 1 percent each trading day for five years. By using banks around the world and small related company names for accounts, Secure Investment obscured the paper trail of investor funds it took in. Some of those banks were in Latvia, in the Baltic region of northern Europe.

A former Countrywide Financial executive who became a whistle-blower is collecting more than $57 million for providing evidence that helped federal prosecutors force Bank of America to pay a record $16.65 billion penalty in connection with its role in churning out shoddy mortgage and related securities before the financial crisis, the New York Times Dealbook blog reported yesterday. Edward O’Donnell reached an agreement last week with the government that enables him to collect part of the settlement that Bank of America agreed to pay in August in a deal with federal prosecutors and a number of state attorneys general, according to a court filing. The payment to O’Donnell arises from a federal lawsuit he filed under the False Claims Act earlier this year and which Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, joined and used as the basis for pressing Bank of America to reach a deal.

Bank of America Corp. and US Bancorp were sued by the agency that oversees federal credit unions, which claimed the banks failed as trustees over securities backed by home mortgages that defaulted after the 2008 credit crisis, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court, claims that Bank of America and US Bancorp served as trustees for residential mortgage-backed securities in 99 trusts with an original face value of $5.8 billion. They failed to review mortgage loan files for irregularities, missing “numerous problems,” including that the trusts “suffered enormous losses due to the high number of mortgage defaults, delinquencies, and foreclosures caused by defective loan origination and underwriting,” according to the complaint by the National Credit Union Administration Board.

RadioShack Corp. is finding an unlikely ally in its efforts to stay out of bankruptcy: credit derivatives traders who amassed more than $25 billion of trades speculating how much longer it can keep paying its bills, Bloomberg News reported today. After a 60 percent surge this year, the amount of credit-default swaps tied to RadioShack is 28 times its debt, more than any other U.S. company. When the retailer’s biggest shareholder arranged $585 million of funding in October to help it survive the holidays, much of the money came from hedge funds wagering on the company to avoid default, including DW Investment Management and Saba Capital Management.

The government has been trying to bolster the financial system for the last five years so it can deal with mayhem in the markets, and the turmoil this week will test those rebuilding efforts, according to a commentary on the New York Times Dealbook Blog today. Investors, after months of piling into risky markets in search of returns, are now stampeding out, according to the commentary. In recent weeks, they have dumped junk bonds issued by American companies, particularly energy companies that have borrowed heavily to exploit the shale oil boom. A steep slide in the price of oil could now cause some of the companies to default, analysts say. The most dangerous pain, however, is occurring abroad. Russia has a full-blown currency crisis, caused partly by the oil price decline. Such difficulties echo the crisis that buffeted markets in the developing world in 1998, when Russia actually defaulted on debt denominated in rubles. And the global convulsions of that year infiltrated the financial system of the United States, even though the country’s economy was performing well, as it is now. Back then, contagion made its way onto Wall Street through an enormous hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management that nearly collapsed after making bets way beyond its means.

The bankruptcy trustee winding down Lehman Brothers’ brokerage business on Monday said he would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review a ruling that awarded billions of dollars in disputed assets to Barclays PLC, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Following Lehman’s 2008 bankruptcy filing, Barclays acquired Lehman’s brokerage business in a “no cash” transaction, Lehman says. A year later, a legal fight over the transaction ensued when Lehman sued Barclays, saying that the British bank negotiated a secret discount in the transaction. Judge James Peck, then Lehman’s bankruptcy judge, concluded that Barclays didn’t receive an improper “windfall” from the sale but wasn’t entitled to the so-called margin cash assets worth $4 billion. Later, however, a three-judge Court of Appeals panel said “ambiguities and loose ends were inevitable” in such a speedy sale and ruled that Barclays was entitled to these disputed assets. Lehman trustee James W. Giddens yesterday said that “while the bankruptcy Court rightly rejected Barclays’ claims to the margin cash assets, the decisions by the District and Appeals Courts reduced the amount available for the general estate by $4 billion, frustrated the purpose of the liquidation, and undermined the credibility of a sale hearing.”

Mortgage servicer Ocwen Financial Corp. failed to ensure that its efforts to comply with a 2012 mortgage-abuse settlement were sufficiently independent from the company’s managers, an independent monitor said, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Joseph A. Smith Jr., a watchdog charged with measuring mortgage firms’ performance under the 2012 settlement, said yesterday that he has directed accounting firm McGladrey LLP to examine Ocwen’s work after an Ocwen employee alleged that the company’s internal review of mortgage-servicing practices wasn’t truly independent. After the 2012 settlement, firms were required to form review committees to oversee their adherence to the pact. Smith will release a report today on Ocwen detailing and validating problems originally raised by the unnamed Ocwen whistleblower. Smith also will review other mortgage-servicing firms.

Seven underwriters of the failed MF Global Holdings Ltd. reached a partial settlement with investors, who had filed a lawsuit in 2011 seeking to hold them and some of the brokerage's executives, including its CEO, responsible for its collapse, Reuters reported today. The proposed settlement calls for the seven underwriters to pay the plaintiffs $74 million, according to court papers filed in a New York court yesterday. The underwriters cited in the settlement are Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, RBS Securities and Sandler O'Neill. Once run by former Goldman Sachs co-chairman and New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine, MF Global collapsed amid worries about Corzine's $6.3 billion bet on European sovereign debt and the use of customer money to cover liquidity shortfalls. Former stockholders and bondholders, led by the Virginia Retirement System and the province of Alberta, Canada, had accused MF Global of inflating its ability to manage risk, obscuring the risks of its big bet on European sovereign debt, and improperly accounting for deferred tax assets.