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Chrysler Group LLC could be forced to stage an initial public offering as a means of resolving a dispute over its value with a United Auto Workers' retiree trust that holds a 41.5 percent stake in the automaker, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The trust yesterday presented Chrysler with a "registration demand" asking it register a portion of its holdings. Chrysler's sales and profit has bounced back strongly since emerging from bankruptcy protection under the management of Italy's Fiat SpA, its majority owner. The move comes amid a court dispute between Fiat and union retirees over the value of the trust's Chrysler shares. The trust recently maintained some of its shares are worth twice what Fiat offered to pay last year.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp. won a delay of Dodd-Frank Act requirements that they wall off some derivatives trades from bank units backed by federal deposit insurance, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Commercial banks including the Wall Street firms may get as long as an additional two years -- until July 2015 -- to comply with the rules, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said in a notice yesterday. The provision was included in Dodd- Frank, the 2010 financial-regulation law, as a way to limit taxpayer support for risky derivatives trades.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Barclays Plc are among the first banks to register swap-dealer divisions under the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires higher capital, collateral and trading standards, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The 65 trading units that have registered include the biggest banks in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Switzerland and Japan, according to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The list, which is expected to grow, reflects companies that had at least $8 billion in swap-dealing business in October and had to register by the end of last year.

Federal regulators are preparing a civil fraud case against a prominent Los Angeles money manager, a government lawyer said at a court hearing on Wednesday, the New York Times DealBook blog reported on Thursday. The manager, Peter J. Eichler Jr., chief executive of Aletheia Research and Management, has received a so-called Wells notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission, an indication that the agency is considering an enforcement action. Gary Leung, an SEC staff lawyer, disclosed the potential lawsuit during a hearing in bankruptcy court. Aletheia filed for bankruptcy protection on Nov. 11, and owes as much as $50 million.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. agreed to buy Oriental Trading Co., a mail-order toy and novelty vendor located in Berkshire's hometown of Omaha, Neb., the Wall Street Journal reported today. The company agreed to pay about $500 million for Oriental Trading. The sale will mark a payday for Oriental Trading's shareholders, KKR & Co. being the largest, which bought the company out of bankruptcy 18 months ago. In the last 12 months, Oriental Trading made about $70 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization by selling party supplies, crafts, decorations and toys through the Internet as well as print catalogs. Private-equity firm KKR owns a one-third stake that it purchased through its KKR Asset Management business. KKR was a creditor to Oriental Trading and exchanged the debt for stock in the company when it exited from bankruptcy in February 2011.

Defunct Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and its affiliates had $14.3 billion in restricted cash on Sept. 30, including $10.9 billion of reserves for claims, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Free cash and investments totaled almost $11 billion, according to a court filing. The claim reserves include $5.8 billion held for disputed amounts, Lehman said. The former investment bank plans two payments to creditors every year. The last payment was Oct. 1. Lehman, which four years after filing the biggest U.S. bankruptcy continues to sell assets to pay creditors, made a first payment of $22.5 billion in April and a second installment of $10.2 billion this month.

Nearly a year after MF Global raided customer accounts in a failed bid to survive, regulators moved this week to tighten restrictions for brokerage firms and adopt new safeguards for client money, the New York Times DealBook blog reported yesterday. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission voted unanimously to propose new customer protections aimed at closing loopholes, bolstering internal controls and forcing firms to provide more disclosures to their clients. The proposal, which may be changed over the next several months, comes as the futures industry suffers a crisis of confidence in the wake of the MF Global debacle.

Some financial advisers are telling wealthy clients that the remainder of 2012 amounts to a last-chance sale on federal tax rates, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. Taxes are set to rise in January in the U.S., pushing the top rate on dividends to 43.4 percent from 15 percent and the top rate on capital gains to 23.8 percent from 15 percent. Advisers at companies including Wells Fargo, Bank of America Corp., Bank of New York Mellon Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Northern Trust Corp. and U.S. Bancorp are discussing with their wealthy clients such strategies as selling appreciated securities, relocating assets to tax-deferred retirement accounts, converting IRAs, exercising stock options and making large gifts to heirs this year. Tax cuts first enacted during George W. Bush’s presidency and extended in 2010 are set to expire Dec. 31.

JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon spoke at a Council on Foreign Relations event on Wednesday on Wall Street regulation, The Washington Post reported yesterday. Dimon, who has crusaded against increased regulation on Wall Street, said that the current regulatory environment has created a lot of confusion with “overlapping jurisdictions, no way to adjudicate disputes.” Dimon anticipates that overhead costs from new domestic and international regulations will hit more than $1 billion a year. A bank of JPMorgan’s size can easily absorb such costs, but Dimon said that smaller institutions will struggle to contend with compliance expenses. Corporations, small businesses, consumers and the housing market are all in better shape, Dimon said. The problem, he said, is the uncertainty around taxes, policy and the fiscal cliff, which is “a huge wet blanket” on an otherwise improving economy. Asked whether he believes the bond markets will move against the U.S., Dimon said it is simply a matter of when, as the country “can’t borrow indefinitely.”

A few days after securing the largest shareholder recovery arising from the financial crisis - $2.43 billion from Bank of America - the plaintiffs' lawyer Max W. Berger still thinks more work needs to be done to shore up the financial system, the New York Times DealBook blog reported today. "It makes me sad that in all of these scandals, no matter how good a job we do of getting results and inflicting pain, the government doesn't seem to follow suit, and nobody learns, and it's business as usual," he said. With last month's settlement with Bank of America, which resolved claims that the bank had misled shareholders about its acquisition of an ailing Merrill Lynch, Berger has now been responsible for six securities class-action settlements of more than $1 billion. His firm, Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann, based in Manhattan, has represented investors in five of the 10 largest securities-fraud recoveries. So far, it has recovered $4.5 billion for investors in cases connected to the subprime mortgage collapse.