NowMyNews

Morgan Stanley posted stronger-than-expected fourth-quarter results, as its retail brokerage and asset management businesses won more assets from clients and benefited from rising stock markets. The bank's retail brokerage business, which manages money for wealthy clients, reached the company's pretax profit margin target, and Morgan Stanley raised that target for the coming years. The results underscored how Morgan Stanley, the second largest U.S. investment bank, has retooled itself since the financial crisis. It now earns more revenues from brokerage and asset management than traditional investment banking businesses like underwriting stock offerings and trading bonds. Its shares rose 4.5 percent to $33.46. "We've said pretty consistently we're one step at a time management team," Chief Executive James Gorman said on a conference call, to explain gradual updates to the bank's strategic plan. Three years ago, he said, Morgan Stanley's return on

Mary Barra, General Motors Co's ( id="symbol_GM.N_0"> GM.N ) new chief executive officer and the auto industry's first female CEO, will be paid up to $4.4 million in cash and stock compensation this year, GM disclosed in a federal filing on Friday. _0"> The package for Barra, who assumed her new role on Wednesday, does not include what she and other executives will receive under the long-term compensation plan, which is subject to shareholder approval in June. GM will disclose those details in April. The No. 1 U.S. automaker revealed in documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that Barra, 52, will receive an annual cash base salary of $1.6 million. She also will be eligible for $2.8 million under the company's short-term incentive plan. GM has not yet disclosed what former CEO Dan Akerson was paid in 2013, but the previous year he was paid $11.1 million, including $1.7 million in cash and $7.3 million in stock and other ince

A cybercrime firm says it has uncovered at least six ongoing attacks at U.S. merchants whose credit card processing systems are infected with the same type of malicious software used to steal data from Target Corp. Andrew Komarov, chief executive of the cybersecurity firm IntelCrawler, told Reuters that his company has alerted law enforcement, Visa Inc and intelligence teams at several large banks about the findings. He said payment card data was stolen in the attacks, though he didn't know how much. IntelCrawler's findings are the latest sign that the cyberattacks disclosed by Target Inc and upscale department store Neiman Marcus are part of a wider assault on U.S. retailer customer data security. On Thursday, the U.S. government and the private security intelligence firm iSIGHT Partners warned merchants and financial services firms that the BlackPOS software used against No. 3 U.S. retailer Target had been used in a string of other breaches at retailers - but did not say

U.S. regulators continue to find weaknesses in the way HSBC Holdings tries to prevent money laundering, according to people familiar with the matter, even after the British bank was forced to pay nearly $2 billion in penalties and invested millions in increasing its compliance. In December 2012, the bank paid to U.S. authorities what was then a record amount to resolve charges that it failed to stop hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money from flowing through the bank from Mexico, and promised at the time to fix the problems. When announcing the settlement, HSBC Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver said: "The HSBC of today is a fundamentally different organization from the one that made those mistakes." But examiners from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency have continued to find problems, two people familiar with the matter said. They said that the regulator told the bank late last year it has not seen enough improvement in the bank's controls in its corr

U.S. prosecutors in Manhattan are sitting on a multimillion-dollar bitcoin gold mine. And it could get much bigger. Federal authorities hauled in 29,655 units of the digital currency - worth $27 million at current exchange rates - through an official forfeiture by Bitcoin this week. The bitcoins had belonged to Silk Road, an anonymous online black market that authorities say was a conduit for purchases of drugs and computer hacking services - even a place where assassins may have advertised. It was shuttered after an FBI raid in September, when agents took control of its server and arrested the man they say was its founder in San Francisco. No one stepped forward to claim these bitcoins, which were found in electronic "wallets" used to store the digital currency. An additional 144,336 bitcoins, worth more than $128 million today, were also discovered, but the government's claim on them is being disputed by Ross William Ulbricht, 29, who U.S. authorities say was the f

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq declined on Friday as results from Intel ( id="symbol_INTC.O_0"> INTC.O ) and General Electric ( id="symbol_GE.N GE.N ) were the latest to dampen the view on fourth-quarter earnings. _1"> Volatility picked up late in the session, thanks in part to selling related to options expiration, analysts said. Earnings season is still in the early phase, but S&P 500 companies so far are beating analysts' expectations at a rate that's below what's typical, according to Thomson Reuters data. Bucking the trend, the Dow ended higher - helped by a rally in American Express Co ( id="symbol_AXP.N_2"> AXP.N ) and Visa ( id="symbol_V.N_3"> V.N ). AmEx jumped 3.6 percent to $90.97 a day after reporting quarterly results. Intel's stock slid 2.6 percent to $25.85 and was among the top weights on each of the three major U.S. stock indexes, a day after the chipmaker gave a lukewarm forecast for first-qua

Intel Corp plans to reduce its global workforce of 107,000 by about 5 percent this year as the chipmaker, struggling with falling personal-computer sales, shifts focus to faster-growing areas, a company spokesman said on Friday. The announcement, equivalent to over 5,000 positions, comes a day after Intel posted a fourth-quarter earnings report that did little to dispel concerns about a slowing PC industry. "This is part of aligning our human resources to meet business needs," spokesman Chris Kraeuter said. The job reductions may include retirements, voluntary programs and other options, Kraeuter said, adding that Intel's typical annual attrition worldwide is about 4 percent. He declined to say whether details of the changes had been announced internally. On a conference call with analysts on Thursday after the earnings release, Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith alluded to a reduction in employment this year and said that Intel would increase investments in area