CITIGROUP

You don’t have to be a genius to determine that in a world of petabytes of data, projected 2012 sales of 367.2 million PCs, 107.4 million tablets and 650 million smartphones, a few smart companies are going to prosper: HP (NYSE: HPQ), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) and EMC.(NYSE: EMC).

Can Richard Schulze, the 71-year-old founding CEO of Best Buy Co. (NYSE: BBY) put his money where his mouth is? Can he fork up billions from private eqiuity behemoths like KKR (NYSE: KKR)?

Citigroup Inc agreed to pay $590 million to settle a shareholder lawsuit accusing it of hiding tens of billions of dollars of toxic mortgage assets, one of the largest settlements stemming from the global financial crisis.

Bank of America Corp. (BAC) discontinued credit protection services to customers as it came under scanner for allegations of customer enrollments through improper practices and charging customers without consent. A class action suit is reportedly pending against BAC on the issue.

Bankrupt imaging giant Eastman Kodak Co. (Pink: EKDKQ) said it may call off its auction of 1,100 patents that was scheduled to conclude Monday. In a statement late Thursday, Kodak said it “has not reached a determination or agreement to sell the digital imaging portfolio.”

Shares of Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), the No. 1 provider of Internet gear, soared more than 8 percent Thursday after reporting fourth-quarter net income that beat analyst estimates by a penny and as boosting its dividend 75 percent to 14 cents a share.

Deutsche Bank, Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, RBS, HSBC, UBS and Citigroup have all received subpoenas, related to the joint New York-Connecticut investigation of possible manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor)

Banco Santander S.A., Mellanox Technologies Ltd, Agrium Inc, Pizza Inn Inc, Newmont Mining Corp, Citigroup Inc, Caterpillar Inc and Groupon Inc are among the companies whose shares are moving in pre-market trading Tuesday.

U.S. regulators directed five of the country's biggest banks, including Bank of America Corp and Goldman Sachs Group Inc, to develop plans for staving off collapse if they faced serious problems, emphasizing that the banks could not count on government help.

Moody's analytics cut India's growth forecast to 5.5 percent for this year, citing the policy inaction from the government and the Reserve Bank of India's decision to keep key rates unchanged, despite an economic slowdown.

China announced Thursday morning that its inflation cooled for a fourth straight month in July.

There's one developing storyline in the saga of Knight Capital Group Inc., the Wall Street market maker that lost more than $440 million Wednesday when an automated trading program it had just installed went berserk, that's not being talked about: It is being propped up by the very people it tried to screw over.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Friday said it plans to sell $4.5 billion in American International Group Inc. (NYSE: AIG) shares, further cutting its ownership stake in the bailed-out insurer.

Shares of U.S. banks of all sizes and specialties rose Friday over 3 percent, handily beating the performance of the wider stock market, which itself was in a head-first rally following a week of disappointing news. But there was one big exception to the equity party: megabank JPMorgan Chase and Co. (NYSE:JPM), which looked poised to underperform its peers in late-afternoon trading.

The U.S. government's report Friday that 163,000 jobs were created last month, far more than expected, sparked a risk-on sentiment among investors.

The firm at the center of a software glitch that prompted highly irregular trading patterns Wednesday morning in shares of more than 100 New York Stock Exchange issues is hanging on by a thread.

A bank equity analyst famous in financial circles for her prescient analysis on the global banking sector said Tuesday morning she sees the financial industry shedding another 200,000 people off the payrolls in the coming months.

IBTimes presents its weekly roundup of winners and losers in the financial world.

Former Citigroup chief executive Sanford I. Weill, one of the most important players in the deregulatory push of the 1990s that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and allowed the formation of too big to fail banks, said on CNBC Wednesday morning that the nation's financial supermarkets should be split up by government mandate.

Two months after the trading fiasco in the initial public offering of Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), the No. 1 social networking site, tech IPOs are soaring again. Palo Alto Networks (Nasdaq: PANW) and Kayak Software (Nasdaq: KYAK) shares soared in their IPOs.

Investors seem to be disregarding the parade better-than-expected profit figures from major financial institutions this earnings season, instead using top-of-the-line revenue and return on equity numbers to guide their investment decisions.