The longtime debate has been revived over whether big banks created justifiable synergies or an inexorable web of risk-a debate for which some fresh fodder has also been provided by the Federal Reserve's stress tests, out Thursday.

Great Rotation Trigger Is 3% Yields, Rosenberg Says: Tom Keene Businessweek Yields on benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury notes need to rise higher than 3 percent to prompt investors to flee the bond mutual fund for equities, according to Jeffrey Rosenberg of BlackRock Advisors LLC. "You're going to need to see some significant and ...

(Reuters) - The Italian parliament convened on Friday for the first time since last month's deadlocked election with no sign of a deal to end the stalemate and yield a new government able to tackle reforms in the euro zone's troubled third-largest economy. The parties have so far failed to find a way out of the impasse created by the election, which left the centre left with a majority in the lower house but without the numbers to control the Senate and form a government.

Analysts polled by Reuters were expecting the consumer sentiment index to rise slightly to 78.0 in March, up from 77.6 in February.. This is a breaking news article. Please check back on CNBC.com for updates to this piece..

A scathing report released by a Senate panel Thursday shows the financial crisis never really abated: The forces that delivered it -- a toxic combination of reckless speculation, balance sheet manipulation and outright disdain for regulators -- remained fully at work inside the biggest bank of them all, JPMorgan Chase, as recently as last spring. The 300-page report, which unfolds in tones worthy of an indictment, says JPMorgan executives brazenly misled and bullied their regulators, going so far as to call them "stupid." This, the report concludes, explains how a bet engineered by a trader called the London Whale for his enormous, market-moving positions burgeoned into losses reaching $6.2 billion. Chief executive Jamie Dimon initially dismissed the Whale losses as a "tempest in a teapot." "In contrast to JPMorgan Chase's reputation for best-in-class risk management, the whale trades exposed a bank culture in which risk limit breaches were routinely disregarded, risk metrics were frequently criticized or downplayed, and risk evaluation models were targeted by bank personnel seeking to produce artificially lower capital requirements," the report concludes. The top in-house regulator at JPMorgan, from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, told the Senate subcommittee that it was "very common" for the bank to push back on examiner filings and recommendations. The regulator recalled one instance in which bank executives yelled at OCC examiners and derided them as "stupid." "The bank's initial claims that its risk managers and regulators were fully informed and engaged ... were fictions irreconcilable with the bank's obligation to provide material information to its investors in an accurate manner," says the report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The report traces responsibility for JPMorgan's trading fiasco to its highest offices, all the way to CEO Dimon...

JPMorgan Sees Home Prices Up 14% as BofA Touts Party Businessweek Ben S. Bernanke's efforts to revive housing are making real estate bulls even more bullish. JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) more than doubled its forecast for U.S. home price gains in 2013 to 7 percent this week, and predicts a more than 14 percent increase ...

NAFCU President and CEO Fred Becker on Wednesday recommended that the CFPB issue guidance combining all of its mortgage rules into "one uniform Regulation Z" to make the compliance process easier for credit unions.