But new evidence reveals the nation’s largest banks have apparently continued to fabricate documents, rip off customers and illegally kick people out of their homes, even after inking a series of settlements over the same abuses. And the worst part of it all is that the main settlement over foreclosure fraud was so weakly written that it actually allows such criminal conduct to occur, at least up to a certain threshold. Potentially hundreds of thousands of homes could be effectively stolen by the big banks without any sanctions.

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Apple is selling the bonds in its first debt issue since the 1990s. The company is raising the money to give to shareholders through dividend payments and stock buybacks.

The company has $145 billion in cash, more than enough for the $100 billion cash return program it announced last week. However, most of its money sits in overseas accounts, and the company doesn't plan to bring it to the U.S. until the federal corporate tax rate is lowered.

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The stock market has recovered all the ground it lost over the previous two weeks, when worries over slower economic growth, falling commodity prices and disappointing quarterly earnings battered financial markets.

The S&P 500 index rose 11.37 points to close at 1,593.61. The 0.7 percent increase nudged the index above its previous closing high of 1,593.36, reached on April 11.

"The market has had a terrific run," said Philip Orlando, chief equity strategist at Federated Investors, noting that the S&P 500 is up 12 percent since the start of 2013. "At the beginning of the year, I thought we were going to 1,660 (for the whole year). We're only about 5 percent from that."

A pair of better economic reports gave investors some encouragement. Wages and spending rose in the U.S. last month, and pending home sales hit their highest level in three years.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 106.20 points to 14,818.75, up 0.7 percent. Microsoft and IBM were among the Dow's best performers, rising more than 2 percent each.

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No sooner did hackers send a false Associated Press tweet reporting explosions at the White House on Tuesday than investors started dumping stocks - eventually unloading $134 billion worth. Turns out, some investors are not only gullible, they're impossibly fast stock traders.

Except most of the investors weren't human. They were computers, selling on autopilot beyond the control of humans, like a scene from a sci-fi horror film.

"Before you could blink, it was over," said Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of Themis Trading and an outspoken critic of high-speed computerized trading. "With people, you wouldn't have this type of reaction."

For decades, computers have been sorting through data and news to help investment funds decide whether to buy or sell. But that's old school. Now "algorithmic" trading programs sift through data, news, even tweets, and execute trades by themselves in fractions of a second, without slowpoke humans getting in the way. More than half of stock trading every day is done this way.

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Apple Inc. on Tuesday said it will buy back $60 billion in shares - the largest buyback authorization in history. It is also raising its dividend by 15 percent.

Investors have been clamoring for Apple to give them access to its cash hoard, which ended March at an unprecedented $145 billion. Apple's tight grip on its cash has been blamed for the steep decline in its stock price over the winter.

News of the cash bonanza coincided with the company's release of a poor quarterly outlook for the three-month period that ends in June. The June quarter is generally a weak one for Apple, since consumers tend to hold off for the next iPhone, which the company usually releases in the fall.

Apple shares rose $18.87, or 4.6 percent, to $425 in extended trading. The shares are still down 40 percent from the peak hit on Sept. 21, when the iPhone 5 went on sale.

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The New York Times reports:

The lawsuit, which could help Mr. Freeh recover money for MF Global’s creditors, blamed Mr. Corzine for ramping up a risky bet on European debt. While the bonds were not by themselves to blame for the collapse of MF Global, the wager spooked the firm’s investors and ratings agencies, pushing it further into a tailspin.

“Corzine engaged in risky trading strategies that strained the company’s liquidity and could not be properly monitored by the company’s inadequate controls and procedures,” Mr. Freeh said.

“Defendants, in their capacities as officers, breached their fiduciary duties of care, loyalty, and oversight over the company, and failed to act in good faith,” Freeh wrote in the complaint.

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Investors have been spooked over recent trading sessions by the declines recorded in commodity prices — not just gold — as well as a run of disappointing economic data from the U.S. and China, the world's two-largest economies.

Monday's explosions in Boston, which killed three people, provided investors a stark reminder of the threats posed by terrorists to a fragile global economic recovery.

"The Boston bombings have only added to the sense of unease amongst investors .... equity markets have slipped in the past few days on worries that the U.S. and Chinese economies have hit an air pocket of economic activity," said Neil MacKinnon, global macro strategist at VTB Capital.

In Europe, the FTSE 100 index of leading British shares was down 0.5 percent at 6,312 while Germany's DAX fell 0.4 percent to 7,6745. The CAC-40 in France was 0.5 percent lower at 3,690.

Wall Street was poised to recoup some of Monday's heavy losses with both Dow futures and the broader S&P 500 futures up 0.6 percent. How they actually open could hinge on a raft of U.S. corporate earnings and economic data that are due before the bell. Inflation and industrial production figures are likely to garner the most attention.

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So what are you to do if, say, you spent years working as a hedge fund attorney, and all your friends and colleagues are in the finance industry, but you really, really want to get elected to something in a liberal city as a Democrat? If you're Reshma Saujani, you just pretend you never had anything to do with Wall Street and hope no one digs too deep.

Saujani is running for New York City public advocate. New York's public advocate, one of only three city-wide elected offices, is sort of like the city's "ombudsman." The advocate's job is essentially to annoy the mayor as much as possible, and then run for that office. The advocate is expected, to put it broadly, to look out for "the little guy," against the city's bureaucracy and police department and so on. The job, thus far, has always gone to liberal, populist figures; Democrats have held the post since it was created in 1994, even as the city repeatedly elected Republican mayors.

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Herbalife's stock was down 21 cents at $38.18 Tuesday. The broader market was mixed.

Accounting firm KPMG told Herbalife that it had to resign as auditor because it learned that a KPMG partner may have used inside information to trade Herbalife stock.

Herbalife said KPMG's resignation was not related to Herbalife's financial statements or accounting practices.

The development comes at an awkward time for Herbalife. Hedge fund mogul Bill Ackman has publicly accused of it distorting its financial information. Herbalife has shot back, saying Ackman just wants to push the stock down for his own profit. Ackman has bet the stock would fall.

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In the 1960s, I met a young man about to be discharged from the Army and then, by happenstance, caught up with him again in each of the next two decades.  Though he died two months before the Lehman Brothers collapse, those brief encounters taught me how the Long Recession led directly to our Great Recession.

In the late 1960s, I was working at an antiwar coffee house near an army base from which soldiers shipped out to Vietnam.  One gangly young man, recently back from “the Nam,” was particularly handy and would fix our record player or make our old mimeograph machine run more smoothly.  He rarely spoke about the war, except to say that his company had stayed stoned the whole time. “Our motto,” he once told me, “was ‘let’s not and say we did.’”  Duane had no intention of becoming a professional Vietnam vet like John Kerry when discharged.  His plan was to return home to Cleveland and make up for time missed in the civilian counterculture of that era.

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The dire warnings that had issued from the White House beforehand – threatening that Social Security checks would be delayed, airport security checks would be clogged, and other federal facilities closed – seem to have been overblown.

Sure, March’s employment report was a big disappointment. But it’s hard to see any direct connection between those poor job numbers and the sequester. The government  has been shedding jobs for years. Most of the losses in March were from the Postal Service.

Take a closer look, though, and Americans are starting to feel the pain. They just don’t know it yet.

That’s because so much of what the government does affects the nation in local, decentralized ways. Federal funds find their way to community housing authorities, state unemployment offices, local school districts, private universities, and companies. So it’s hard for most Americans to know the sequester is responsible for the lost funding, lost jobs, or just plain inconvenience.

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The Dow Jones industrial average was down 105 points at 14,500 at midday Friday, a drop of 0.7 percent. The Dow had been down as much as 171 points earlier.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 13 points, or 0.8 percent, to 1,547. Technology fell the most of the 10 industry groups in the index.

The Nasdaq was down a percent, or 34 points, at 3,190.

The government reported that U.S. employers added the fewest jobs in nine months in March and more people gave up looking for work. The report was worse than economists were expecting.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to its lowest level this year, 1.69 percent.

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When it comes to our recent financial implosion, this is easy enough to see, although great efforts have been expended trying to deny the self-evident.  “Man” did not bring the system to its knees; the country’s dominant financial institutions and a complicit government did that.  They’ve recovered, the rest of us haven’t.

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The FBI says Matthew Marshall Taylor surrendered Wednesday morning in Manhattan. The U.S. attorney's office said he was awaiting a court appearance.

In November, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission alleged in a lawsuit that Taylor hid a trade that cost his employer more than $118 million.

The agency said he failed to disclose an $8 billion position on a futures contract that came back to hurt the company in December 2007.

The lawsuit did not name Goldman as Taylor's employer. However, a Goldman spokeswoman confirmed he had worked there, admitted misconduct and was terminated.

The name of his attorney was not immediately known.

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NEW YORK (AP) — The Standard & Poor's 500 index is trading above its previous closing high reached in October 2007, a year before the peak of the financial crisis.

The S&P 500 was up four points, or 0.3 percent, at 1,567 shortly before noon Eastern time Thursday. That's two points above its record close.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 46 points, or 0.3 percent, to 14,572. The Nasdaq composite rose four points, 0.1 percent, to 3,260.

Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry smartphones, rose 3 percent to $14.95 after surprising analysts with a profitable quarter and better-than-expected sales of its touch-screen BlackBerry 10s.

The government reported that the U.S. economy grew faster than first estimated in the fourth quarter. However the annual rate of 0.4 percent was still anemic.

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"The system's profile as an offshore financial center is unlikely to survive this crisis," Moody's senior credit officer Sarah Carlson said. "The potentially irreparable damage to the country's current drivers of economic growth leaves its ability to sustain its current debt highly in doubt."

The crisis had negative implications for the credit ratings of the region's countries. Moody's Investors' Service says Cyprus will still be at risk of default for a "prolonged period" and possibly a euro zone exit. "Even if negotiations are successful and Cyprus remains within the euro area," the service said in a Monday statement, "policy makers' recent decisions raise the risk of deposit outflows, capital flight, increased bank and sovereign-funding costs and broader financial market dislocation."

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This is the story of how the world’s largest banks came to love the House Agriculture Committee.

In Washington, we often witness politicians forgetting the lessons of a year or five years or 10 years ago. It takes some special obliviousness to forget the lessons of Friday. Five days ago, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., delivered a critical report and held an explosive hearing detailing the “London Whale” trades, made by a JPMorgan Chase satellite office in London. As you may have read, these trades turned sour and led to a $6.2 billion loss for the bank in a matter of weeks. More important, JPMorgan misled regulators about the nature of the trades, altered its internal processes to take on more risk, and then hid the losses by improperly mismarking the value on its balance sheet, pretending the shortfall was inconsequential to avoid oversight and present a positive financial picture to investors.

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The investors' purchases were made from May 11, 2006 through Nov. 28, 2008.

Citigroup Inc. denied the allegations and said in a statement late Monday that it agreed to the settlement so it could get rid of further expenses and uncertainties that come along with drawn out litigation.

"This settlement is another significant step toward resolving our exposure to claims arising from the financial crisis, and we look forward to putting this matter behind us," the New York company said in a statement.

Citigroup said that the proposed $730 million payment will be made from its existing litigation reserves. The settlement will be reviewed by Judge Sidney Stein in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where the lawsuit is pending.

Citigroup has been undergoing a transformation since Michael Corbat took over as CEO after former CEO Vikram Pandit resigned abruptly in October.

Corbat's first bold move was a decision, announced in December, to cut 11,000 jobs, close dozens of branches and trim the company's consumer banking business in some countries.

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