Britain's service sector showed its strongest activity since the start of the credit crunch in October, helped by growth in new orders to a two-year high, a purchasing managers survey showed on Wednesday.

The Internal Revenue Service's amnesty program, which ends at 5 p.m. EDT on Thursday, has seen 7,500 individuals come forward over six months, getting in before the IRS pursues them.

Recently released, the Global Financial Centres Index, which was created by the Z/Yen Group for the city of London, ranks 75 major financial centers in terms of their competitiveness on a global scale. Important factors to gauge a center's competitiveness include people, business environment, infrastructure, market access and general competitiveness, which includes measures such as occupancy costs, tax information and exchange agreements, for a total of 64 instrumental factors.

The global banking industry is a diverse landscape of financial services — consumer, corporate, investment — but with so many players in the marketplace, which are the best in each segment?

Stocks snapped a five-day winning streak Friday as a sharp drop in oil prices and profit-taking offset an improvement in consumer confidence and a rosier outlook from economic bellwether FedEx. Still, for the week, stocks gained 1.7 percent.

Asia has already emerged more forcefully from recession than the U.S. and Europe and that  upturn  is starting to feed into the job market. Hiring is starting to pick up again, recruiters and bankers say.

Stanford investors are suing five banks, including two in the US, that handled billions of dollars in customer deposits for Stanford International Bank in Antigua, the offshore bank at the heart of the alleged Ponzi scheme.

Stocks rallied to their highest closes since November Monday following encouraging economic reports from the U.S. and abroad and following news that auto sales got a boost from the "Cash for Clunkers" program.

Stocks rallied Monday after a pair of encouraging reports on the manufacturing sector, plus strong bank earnings out of Europe and expectations for strong auto sales. The S&P briefly topped 1,000, a level it hasn't seen since November.

Stocks got a quick pop at the open Monday after some strong bank earnings out of Europe and expectations that auto sales will show a boost from the "Cash for Clunkers" program. But the rally quickly fizzled.

Stock index futures indicated a strong opening for Wall Street Monday, helped by European markets that hit a broader-index high for the year on better-than-expected bank earnings.

After better-than-expected results from Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase this week, Ralph Silva, director at TowerGroup, told CNBC the disparity between them and the rest of the banks in the U.S. has widened so much that there is no longer any competition within the U.S. banking sector.

JPMorgan tops a list of the world's strongest banks, while Royal Bank of Scotland suffered the biggest loss of any lender last year, according to new industry rankings on Wednesday.