According to WashingtonPost the Obama administration pledged Thursday to provide unlimited financial assistance to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, an eleventh-hour move that allows the government to exceed the current $400 billion cap on emergency aid without seeking permission from a bailout-weary Congress.  The Christmas Eve announcement by the Treasury Department means that it can continue to run the companies, which were seized last year, as arms of the government for the rest of President Obama's current term.

On Monday Citi reported that it sold three credit card portfolios representing $1.3 billion in managed assets, as part of a plan to unload weak businesses and troubled assets that caused huge losses. The company did not disclose the names of the buyers.With no details of the deal Citi said that it will continue to service the portfolios through the first half of 2010.

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit said in an interview with Singapore`s Business Times that the bank plans to sell 20 businesses in consumer finance area, many of them located in Europe. The move was due to the shift in the consumer finance market where "there is less funding availability and they are probably less robust as businesses." Besides, Pandit added that on the completion of the exchange

HSBC was fined £3m by the Financial Services Authority for failing to properly look after its customers' information and private data, as such breaches led to at least two losses of customer data.The FSA was probing the bank and found unencrypted customer details on open shelves and unlocked cabinets. It was also uncovered that clients’ details were sent through the post or couriers to third parties, moreover employees were not trained in dealing with risks related to identity theft.

As the Nikkei reported today, private-sector banks were criticized by some Japanese central bank policymakers for their failure to adequately reduce risks from holding stocks. At first, criticism came at the Bank of Japan's February 3 meeting, when the bank decided to resurrect a stock-purchasing program, which involved spending up to 1 trillion yen (or $11.5 billion) purchasing stocks held by financial institutions, in order to ensure financial system stability.

The Federal Reserve on Thursday said that commercial banks increased their borrowings from Fed’s emergency lending program over past week. They borrowed in average $41.9 billion daily over the week that ended Wednesday, comparing to $38.2 billion in the week ending May 27. At the same time investment firms didn't borrowed over the past week from the Fed program.

Wells Fargo recently released a native iPhone app in the Apple App Store thus joining the "big four" banks who are now offering their own banking applications for iPhone handsets. The new thingamajig allows checking Wells Fargo banking balances and can be used immediately after you download it to your iPhone. You just need to enter your normal online banking username/password.

While not heavily consumed across the globe electronic banking today is a well known and rather wide spread concept. People in many countries though may not be using e-banking services themselves at least have some remotest idea of what it means and how it works. In western countries e-banking is comparatively popular and practiced by a great number of bank customers. Similar picture can be seen in Eastern Asia as well. Meantime in Middle East e-banking is kind of less adopted though not unknown of course.

Everybody wants to deal with a safe bank. It will help you avoid money losses, headaches and stresses in the future. But how to tell that your money is in a safe place? There are several bank rating services that may help you foresee bank failures. They take into consideration banks’ strength, asset quality, profitability, and exposure to various risks. Don’t forget to check them before opening an account. 

Fundtech Ltd., a provider of global transaction banking solutions, announced that it introduced its new version of PAYplus USA known as PAYplus Connect. It targets community banks that require a low volume solution at a low cost. PAYplus Connect will be offered on a SaaS (Software as a Service) basis and will provide community banks with the wire transfer features that large banks have, on an outsourced, pay-per-transaction basis.

Barclays has revealed it was in exclusive talks to sell its iShares asset management unit to private equity firm CVC Partners. The deal is likely to be worth around 3 billion pounds ($4.3 billion). Some of the other potential bidders were Goldman Sachs Bain Capital and a consortium of Hellman & Friedman and Apax Partners.

According to the Financial Times, New York prosecutors started the investigating process connecting with the early payment of bonuses at Merrill Lynch last year to learn whether it was to stimulate the markdown of the value of their trading positions in the last days of December.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. released its fourth quarter 2008 report that shows the company had a net income of $702 million, compared with net income of $3.0 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007. Earnings per share made up $0.07 against $0.86 in the fourth quarter last year. For the full year of 2008 net income amounted $5.6 billion, or $1.37 per share, a 64% decrease from $15.4 billion, or $4.38 per share in 2007.

When people talk about giant corporations they imagine colossal edifices and huge revenues, they think that those who work at these entities are very rich men, which have luxurious cars and villas. And only qualified professionals realize that it is not the assets or revenues themselves that make the name of a company it is the people who stand behind the name.

The bloodletting in the financial- services industry will accelerate in coming months, with job cuts doubling to about 350,000 worldwide by mid-2009, said Brian Sullivan, chief executive officer of search firm CTPartners.  Reductions on that scale would be equivalent to 20 percent of the global workforce at financial companies before the credit crisis began, said Sullivan, whose firm has worked with Citigroup Inc.