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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.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released a report yesterday saying that the Volcker Rule will cost U.S. national banks as much as $4.3 billion to implement as it forces them to sell restricted investments at a loss, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The regulator estimates implementation costs between $413 million and $4.3 billion for banks it supervises, the OCC report said. Most of the potential costs could come from the rule’s curbs on certain investments, such as in some collateralized loan obligations. The agency also said that affected banks will mostly be those with more than $10 billion in assets and could include as many as seven community banks.

A U.S. judge who froze assets belonging to the American affiliate of bankrupt Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox Co. loosened that restraint to see where some of the digital currency flows, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. U.S. District Judge Gary Feinerman yesterday revised his temporary order issued March 11 to allow movement — and possibly tracking — of small amounts of Bitcoin. Mt. Gox Co. filed for bankruptcy in Tokyo on Feb. 28 after announcing earlier last month that that it couldn’t account for 750,000 customer Bitcoins and about 100,000 of its own, about 7 percent of Bitcoins worldwide. Mt. Gox said yesterday that it had located about 200,000 Bitcoins stored in an old-format “wallet” that it had previously counted as missing. The company said its revised count of missing Bitcoins, 650,000, may change depending on the results of an investigation.

The Federal Reserve's annual test of big banks' financial health showed that the largest U.S. firms are strong enough to withstand a severe economic downturn, a sign that many will get the green light soon to reward investors by raising dividends and buying back shares, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The Fed said 29 of the 30 largest institutions have enough capital to continue lending even when faced with a hypothetical jolt to the U.S. economy lasting into 2015, including a severe drop in housing prices and a spike in unemployment. The Fed's annual "stress tests" are designed to ensure large banks can withstand severe losses during times of market turmoil. Only Zions Bancorp, a regional lender based in Salt Lake City, posted capital levels during the two-year-downturn scenario that didn't meet the Fed's minimum standards. The Fed said Zions had a Tier 1 common capital ratio of 3.5 percent, below the 5 percent level the Fed views as a minimum allowance. The ratio measures high-quality capital as a percentage of risk-weighted assets such as mortgages, commercial loans and securities.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. will sell its physical commodities unit to Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. for $3.5 billion, ending a five-year foray into owning and storing raw materials amid pressure from regulators to leave the business, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The deal, disclosed in a statement from New York-based JPMorgan today, takes the bank out of industries such as petroleum products and power while cementing Mercuria’s standing among the world’s biggest commodity traders. JPMorgan will continue to provide services and products tied to commodities including financing, market-making and the vaulting and trading of precious metals, the bank said. JPMorgan is selling amid concern among regulators that banks could control prices if they own commodities as well as trade them, or suffer catastrophic losses that would endanger the financial system. The Federal Reserve said in July it might force insured lenders to get out, and JPMorgan agreed later that month to pay $410 million to settle claims that it manipulated power markets, without admitting wrongdoing.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, citing an inability to fully understand swaps-market data, has begun an overhaul of information collected by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., CME Group Inc. and others, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The top U.S. derivatives regulator released a request for comment yesterday on about 70 questions on ways to change how and which information must be reported to the swap-data repositories created under Dodd-Frank Act rules. The CFTC could later propose changes to policies intended to help regulators supervise the $693 trillion market.

William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has privately raised concerns in recent weeks about a proposed rule that seeks to make the nation’s largest banks safer, frustrating other regulators who see it as a centerpiece of a financial system overhaul and want it to take effect swiftly, the New York Times reported today. The rule, proposed last July and known as the supplementary leverage ratio, would put a stricter cap on the amount of borrowing that the biggest banks can do. Dudley raised the possibility that the rule could inhibit the Fed’s ability to conduct monetary policy. A person familiar with Mr. Dudley’s thinking insisted that he is comfortable with the leverage rule. He took his concerns to Fed officials in Washington merely to help make sure that they had properly considered the rule’s potential effect on monetary policy, this person said. The Fed officials in Washington assessed his concerns but did not think they were serious enough to warrant significant changes to the rule.

Arcapita Bank is suing two Arab banks to recover a total of $45.3 million the investment firm transferred to them just before its 2012 bankruptcy filing, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The suits, filed by the Bahrain-based bank against Saudi Arabia's Al Baraka Banking Group BSC and Bahrain-based Alubaf Arab International Bank BSC, are the biggest of 59 lawsuits Arcapita filed on Monday seeking money it shelled out within 90 days before its March 2012 bankruptcy filing. Arcapita is suing two units of Al Baraka for a total of $35.3 million and is going after Alubaf for $10 million in a separate suit. Arcapita, which emerged from bankruptcy last September, filed the suits on Monday in bankruptcy court, two days before the two-year statute of limitations for these types of lawsuits runs out.

State regulators are redoubling efforts to shield vulnerable Americans from short-term loans with interest rates that can exceed 300 percent, the New York Times reported today. The crackdown gained momentum on Tuesday when the Illinois attorney general, Lisa Madigan, accused All Credit Lenders of misleading borrowers into taking out expensive loans that come with insurance products that they do not need or cannot use. In a lawsuit against All Credit Lenders, Madigan contends the company, which has storefronts in Illinois, South Carolina and Wisconsin, deceived borrowers into buying a product pitched as a way to protect them from falling behind on payments in the event of a job loss. But those protections never materialize, the lawsuit said. In fact, the fee is actually a way to raise interest rates that circumvent the state’s usury cap of 36 percent.

Wells Fargo created an elaborate guide for how to produce missing documents to foreclose on homeowners, according to a lawsuit that has caught the attention of state and federal regulators, the Washington Post reported yesterday. The bank denies wrongdoing, but the allegations rekindle claims that lenders, including Wells Fargo, used forged and shoddy paperwork during the recession to quickly foreclose on struggling homeowners, a practice known as “robo-signing.” Those charges led to a $25 billion national mortgage settlement that was supposed to put an end to such abusive practices, but bankruptcy lawyer Linda Tirelli says nothing has changed. In the course of defending a New York homeowner facing foreclosure, Tirelli said that she found a 150-page manual instructing Wells Fargo lawyers how to process foreclosures when a key document, known as an endorsement, is missing. Lenders need endorsements to prove that they own the mortgage, before they can foreclose on a homeowner.