One of the federal government’s most opaque methods for bailing out the banking system allowed a handful of giant institutions to save up to $25 billion on their borrowing costs, a Congressional panel estimated on Friday.

The guarantees offered by the US government to ensure the financial system does not collapse have changed the world forever because now expectations are that the same guarantees will be offered in major crises, Elizabeth Warren, the head of the Congressional Oversight panel on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), told CNBC Friday.

Citigroup is planning to relaunch Citi Alternative Investments (CAI), a unit that contains its hedge fund operations, the Financial Times reported on its website on Friday.

The U.S. government guaranteed $4.3 trillion in financial assets, a bailout watchdog panel said. But the programs have generated fees of about $17.4 billion, while only up to $2 million is expected to be paid out.

Four former dealers at UBS plundered customer accounts to trade and dumped the resulting losses on them, Britain's financial regulator said, further denting the battered Swiss bank's reputation.

Citigroup Inc. filed plans for an initial public offering of its Primerica Inc. life insurance unit late Thursday, and said it will sell the rest of the unit after it goes public.

New York City health officials scrambled to explain themselves Thursday following outraged media reports about bankers who got scarce H1N1 flu vaccines through their employers

Tom Maheras, Citigroup's former president and the man at the heart of the firm's push into what eventually became tens of billions of dollars in toxic debt, is running a hedge fund that is up 84 percent so far this year thanks at least in part to some unusual investing.

While US officials publicly support a strong dollar, in private they don't appear so worried about its recent slide.

A trader blamed with crippling Citigroup is making a comeback by starting a hedge fund that has already attracted decent interest, people familiar with the situation told CNBC.

Billionaire Warren Buffett decided he did not need investment bankers when he negotiated his rapid takeover of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp even as the railroad was represented by veteran banker Roger Altman's boutique firm Evercore as well as Goldman Sachs.

Eight major US banks that received government bailouts have already set aside $117.6 billion this year to pay employees, almost as much as they paid in all of 2008, a Reuters analysis finds .

The nation's biggest banks face a February deadline for submitting employee compensation plans to the Federal Reserve, according to people with knowledge of the process.

The government's "pay czar" expects compensation plans for additional employees at the seven companies getting the biggest bailouts to be in place by year's end, while the Federal Reserve will soon start its own work on banks' pay practices.

Signed contracts to buy previously occupied U.S. homes rose for the eighth straight month in September as buyers scrambled to take advantage of a tax credit for first-time buyers.