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SAC Capital Advisors LP urged a federal judge to approve its record $1.8 billion insider-trading settlement with the government, saying the firm is “deeply remorseful” for the illegal acts of its employees, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. SAC lawyer Martin Klotz asked U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain in a two-page letter yesterday to sign off on the agreement, which also calls for the firm to close its investment advisory business. A sentencing hearing before Swain is scheduled for April 10 in Manhattan. Four SAC units were indicted last year, accused of reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal profit through insider trades by employees dating to 1999. Steven A. Cohen, the firm’s founder, faces an administrative action by the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging he failed to supervise the hedge fund’s activities. Eight current or former SAC employees have been convicted of insider trading charges.

The U.S. Treasury Department plans to sell more than half of its remaining shares of Ally Financial Inc. as part of an initial public offering of the auto lender, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The Treasury said yesterday that it intends to sell 95 million shares in its latest move to further wind down its ownership stake. Ally and Treasury said Thursday that the agency would offer the shares at $25 to $28 apiece. In total, the deal could raise $3.06 billion, Ally said. The Treasury, which currently owns 177.3 million shares of Ally, also granted underwriters the option to buy an additional 14.25 million shares. The move is another milestone for the Detroit-based company that teetered on the brink of collapse during the financial crisis, weighed down by losses and litigation tied to subprime mortgages. To keep Ally afloat, the Treasury provided $17.2 billion in rescue funds to the company through the Troubled Asset Relief Program. To date, the government has recouped about $15.3 billion of that amount.

Bank of America Corp. and former Chief Executive Kenneth Lewis took big steps to put the financial crisis behind them by paying state and federal agencies to settle lawsuits over the acquisitions of Countrywide Financial Corp. and Merrill Lynch & Co., the Wall Street Journal reported today. The Charlotte, N.C.-based lender said yesterday that it would pay $9.5 billion to settle mortgage claims with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and their federal regulator. Bank of America also agreed to pay the state of New York $15 million to end a civil lawsuit by New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman alleging that the bank duped shareholders by failing to disclose mounting losses at Merrill before buying the securities firm in a rushed deal struck in 2008 near the height of the financial crisis. The bank neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing in both settlements.

Citigroup, HSBC, Santander, Royal Bank of Scotland and Zions Bank are all facing questions about their ability to ride out another calamity in the financial markets, the Washington Post reported today. The Federal Reserve said yesterday that the five big banks need to resubmit their proposals to pay out billions of dollars to shareholders because of weaknesses in their capital plans. All five banks have 90 days to resubmit their plans for approval, though they can continue to distribute dividends and buy back stock in the interim at current levels.

MetLife Inc. and Prudential Financial Inc. are cutting Wall Street’s middlemen out of the resurgent market for loans backed by some of the nation’s most-prized commercial properties, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Banks from Deutsche Bank AG to JPMorgan Chase & Co. — which originate loans and then sell them off as securities — risk losing out as rising borrowing costs prompt them to charge more to make money. Insurers are offering cheaper real estate loans because they don’t need to quickly sell the debt at a profit, pushing Wall Street firms to lower their standards just to get deals done. As a result, sales of commercial-mortgage backed bonds are falling short of predictions for the best year since 2007: Issuance slumped to $14.6 billion from $20 billion in the same period last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Bank of America Corp. cut its forecast last week for deals tied to single loans, typically backed by the higher-quality properties that insurers target, as sales plunged 66 percent from last year’s record $9.1 billion.

HSBC Holdings Plc was accused of targeting minority borrowers in Chicago with high-cost mortgage loans as Cook County, Ill., followed other local governments in trying to hold subprime lenders liable for urban blight, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Cook County, second in size only to Los Angeles County, seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for its alleged costs to police and maintain deteriorating neighborhoods and from lost tax revenue on vacant properties, according to the complaint filed March 21 against HSBC North America Holdings. The county’s lawsuit against HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, mirrors claims brought by Baltimore, Cleveland, and Memphis, Tennessee, targeting banks under the Fair Housing Act for making loans to minority borrowers who didn’t qualify for them, or for giving high-interest subprime mortgages to minority borrowers who could have qualified for prime loans.

U.S. securities regulators, under pressure from the asset-management industry, are preparing to exempt a majority of money-market mutual funds from a central plank of rules intended to curb risks in the $2.6 trillion market, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The Securities and Exchange Commission, poised to implement structural changes to money funds in coming months, is expected to broaden an exemption for mom-and-pop retail investors from requirements that certain money funds abandon their signature $1 share price and float in value like other mutual funds. Supporters of a floating share price argue it would train investors to accept slight fluctuations in the value of their shares and not panic if they fall below the $1 price.

In a victory for the banking industry, a U.S. appeals court on Friday struck down a district court decision that ordered the Federal Reserve to rewrite its rules governing fees that banks collect each time a debit card is swiped, the Washington Post reported today. The ruling reverses a July decision by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, who said that the central bank set the cap too high under pressure from the banking lobby. The Fed gave banks the thumbs-up to charge retailers as much as 21 cents a transaction, about half the previous 44-cent charge per swipe. Consumers will not feel any immediate impact from the ruling since banks and merchants operated under the Fed’s cap throughout the legal battle. The appeals court decision is a blow to merchants who have fought for nearly four years to limit the interchange fee, or “swipe fee.” Merchants have argued that consumers are the ultimate victims of these fees because the costs are usually passed on to them in the form of higher prices.

McGraw Hill Financial Inc.’s Standard & Poor’s unit must face California’s claims it deceived the state’s pension funds in its ratings of mortgage-back securities, a judge said in a provisional ruling, Bloomberg News reported on Saturday. California Superior Court Judge Curtis Karnow in San Francisco said on Friday that he was inclined to deny the company’s request to throw out the state’s claims of deceptive conduct from a lawsuit alleging S&P violated false-advertising and business practices laws. The state accuses S&P of using “magic numbers” to inflate ratings of mortgage-backed securities bought by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and the state’s teacher pension fund. The funds lost more than $1 billion on the investments, according to the state.

Credit Suisse Group AG, Switzerland’s second-biggest bank, agreed to pay $885 million to settle lawsuits by the Federal Housing Finance Agency over mortgages sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. The company will book a charge of 275 million francs ($312 million) after taxes in the fourth quarter of 2013, resulting in a restatement of results to a net loss of 8 million francs for the period, the Zurich-based bank said yesterday. Credit Suisse was among 18 lenders sued by the FHFA in 2011 to recoup losses on about $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities sold to the two government-sponsored companies before the financial crisis. Nine companies, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Deutsche Bank AG and UBS AG, have agreed to pay more than $9.2 billion to settle similar lawsuits by FHFA.