Securities regulators from several states raided the St. Louis headquarters of Wachovia Securities, part of Wachovia, as part of a broad investigation into questionable practices involving auction rate securities, Missouri officials said.

Short-selling is a vital part of maintaining balance in the market, and people should stop viewing it as "evil" or "un-American", said Paul Roth, a partner at Schulte, Roth & Zabel.

Stocks closed with huge gains as drop in oil prices boosted sectors previously battered by energy costs. Financials also moved sharply higher.

Stocks pushed higher as oil plunged for the second day in a row and financials staged an across-the-board rally that stemmed investor pessimism about the effects of inflation on the economy.

A grand jury subpoena sent by prosecutors in the Bronx earlier this year sought information to help identify people blogging anonymously on a Web site about New York politics called Room 8. The subpoena carried a warning in capital letters that disclosing its very existence “could impede the investigation being conducted and thereby interfere with law enforcement” — implying that if the bloggers blabbed, they could be prosecuted.

U.S. securities regulators are boosting efforts to stop the spread of false rumors that threaten financial institutions, after a week that saw steep slides in the shares of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Lehman Brothers.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said financial market turbulence persists and that government officials are focused on helping the financial system regain stability.

As employers hand out electronic devices to their employees at a greater pace, there are growing concerns that workers eligible for overtime pay, known as non-exempt employees, could begin suing their employers for overtime hours earned while tapping on their devices during after-work hours.

Anheuser-Busch sued InBev in an effort to stop its Belgian-Brazilian suitor from taking any more steps to replace the U.S. brewer's board of directors, which had rejected a $46.3 billion takeover offer from InBev.

To arrive at America's Top States for Business,  we scored all 50 states—using publicly available data—on 40 different measures of competitiveness., and then separated those metrics into the ten broad categories.

The Democratic-led Senate approved the newest member of the Federal Reserve’s System Board of Governors last Friday, making Elizabeth A. Duke the seventh woman to become a member of the board since the board was formed in 1913.

A federal judge in Miami authorized the Internal Revenue Service to request information from UBS about U.S. taxpayers who may be using Swiss bank accounts to evade federal income taxes, the U.S. Justice Department said Tuesday.

The U.S. Justice Department said it asked a federal court in Miami for an order authorizing the Internal Revenue Service to request information from Zurich-based UBS about U.S. taxpayers who may be using Swiss bank accounts to evade federal income taxes.

In response to record oil and gasoline prices, the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday approved 402 to 19 legislation directing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to use its authority, including the agency's emergency powers, to "curb immediately" the role of excessive speculation in energy futures markets.

South Korea's finance minister said on Thursday he preferred strengthening supervision of bank lending to directly controlling money supply as a means to cool hefty money supply growth, an online news provider reported.