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Citing an anonymous source, The Wall Street Journal reported ($) on its website Monday that Citigroup Inc., spent a maximum of three weeks waiting to inform its credit card account holders of a security breach.

Citigroup hacked; Customer data exposed

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The financial world was abuzz when rumors surfaced of a major document dump from WikiLeaks destined to embarrass one of America's banking giants.

Bank of America reportedly set up a crisis team to deal with the dump, and stocks fell on the rumors.

The financial system can take a breather, however, for now.

In an interview with two Swiss newspapers, Assange said WikiLeaks has been losing "600,000 francs," the equivalent of roughly $618,000, every week since they first began publishing diplomatic cables.

While external political pressures on WikiLeaks have not deterred their work, their financial troubles have certainly caused problems, Assange said.

CBS News Special Report: WikiLeaks

"We will not divulge (the banking documents we have) right away," Assange said. "We are too busy with the diplomatic cables and with our financial troubles."

Despite reports of a book deal worth more than $1 million, Assange said the money has not been realized yet, and that he will only truly see a financial windfall from his memoir if it sells well.

Assange does not divulge in the interview with Swiss papers exactly what is costing his website so much money.

WikiLeaks has, however, been the target of frequent cyberattacks, and it has also had several avenues for receiving funds, from PayPal to Mastercard, cut off.

Additionally, Assange himself has been dealing with a lengthy legal process in England involving sexual assault charges in Sweden.

The rate at which WikiLeaks has released U.S. diplomatic cables to the public has slowed dramatically in the last few weeks. Assange assured his Swiss interviewers, however, that things more or less function normally with his website, despite the financial difficulties.

Bank of America is scrambling to prepare itself ahead of an expected WikiLeaks document dump that may expose damaging information about the bank, according to a New York Times report.

After revealing thousands of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in November that he was set to expose as "ecosystem of corruption" at a major U.S. bank. In an interview more than a year earlier, Assange said he had five gigabytes of information from a Bank of America executive's hard drive and was deciding how to release it.

Given Assange's comments, Bank of America has set up a special team to pore over thousands of documents and investigating whether any computers have gone missing in an effort to pin down what information might possibly be exposed.

CBS News Special Report: WikiLeaks

The Charlotte, N.C.-based bank has also employed the consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton to assist with the review.

According to the report, the investigation has turned up no evidence to suggest that Assange has acquired a hard drive directly from the bank. But the bank provided documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission, congressional investigators and the New York attorney general's office in the last two years that could account for Assange's claims.

How WikiLeaks Enlightened Us in 2010

Officials from all three bodies deny WikiLeaks could have obtained the information through them.

In a move last month that could have inflamed any WikiLeaks aggression, Bank of America joined Mastercard and Paypal in ceasing to process payments to WikiLeaks, on the basis that its leaks may be illegal.

The U.S. Justice Department has indicated it is investigating possible charges against WikiLeaks and Assange. And in Sweden, Assange remains the focus of a sex crimes investigation. Swedish authorities have requested his extradition from Britain, where he remains free on bail.

In March, Wikileaks tackled the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by dumping nearly 500,000 U.S. intelligence documents on the general public, many of which detailed the uglier sides of war. This past week, the Internet organization released about 250,000 diplomatic cables which pulled the curtain back and revealed the frank, often embarrassing assessments of U.S. and international leaders on some of the world's most controversial topics.

The next act for the self-described not-for-profit media organization may be taking on the American banking industry.

In a recent interview with Forbes magazine, the site's founder, Julian Assange, said he will release tens of thousands of documents from a major U.S. financial firm in early 2011. He called the release a comprehensive look at a corporation's bad behavior.

"It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume," he told Forbes. "You could call it the ecosystem of corruption, but it's also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that's not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they're fulfilling their own self-interest."

While Assange did not tell Forbes which bank will be targeted, he did tell Computer World magazine in an October 2009, interview that Wikileaks possesses nearly 5GB of information lifted "from Bank of America, one of the executive's hard drives."

Read: Bank of America Shares Fall on Wikileaks Fears

Assuming he avoids his arrest warrant for rape charges in Sweden, Assange may move away from going after the U.S. government and on to going after more private sector entities. Assange told Forbes has damaging, unpublished material from pharmaceutical companies, finance firms (aside from the upcoming bank release), and energy companies, just to name a few industries.

More on the Wikileaks Diplomatic Cables:

Wikileaks Sends U.S. Scrambling Over Security
Leaked Cables Reveal Locations of European Nukes
Hoekstra on WikiLeaks: "A Number of Time Bombs"
Outrage Over Wikileaks
The WikiLeaks Impact
WikiLeaks Releases State Dept. Documents
Key GOP Pol: WikiLeaks a Terrorist Group
Ahmadinejad Dismisses WikiLeaks Cable "Mischief"
U.S. Cables: Iran Armed Hezbollah Via Ambulances
Hoekstra: World's Trust in U.S. Now at Risk
U.S. Encouraged Diplomats to Spy, Leaks Show
Leaked Cables Shine Light on Iran Nuclear Threat
Worldwatch: Embarrassing Revelations Abound
Worldwatch: Diplomatic Shockers
White House Condemns WikiLeaks' Document Release
WikiLeaks Defies U.S., Releases Embassy Cables

Links to Leaked Cables:

States' Secrets (NYT)
The US Embassy Cables, Live Updates (Guardian)
How America Views the Germans (Spiegel, in English)
Los papeles del Departamento de Estado (El Pais)
WikiLeaks : le "dernier degrade d'irresponsabilite" selon Sarkozy (Le Monde)

Stocks gained ground on the week, closing on Friday at nearly the precise place where they started the year. The catalyst was corporate earnings, which were better than expected.

Investors are beginning to consider that there will be enough growth in the second half of the year to maintain the economic recovery.

Nerves were also soothed when the results of the European bank stress tests were better than anticipated: 7 of 91 banks failed, although the tests appeared to be rigged, or at the very least flawed, because they didn't measure the risk of a sovereign default. How would these banks do if a country like Greece defaulted? That answer will have to wait ...

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This post by Jill Schlesinger originally appeared on CBS' MoneyWatch.com.

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Here it comes...2300 pages of financial regulatory reform. New England senators Scott Brown, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins joined all but one democrat in a 60 to 39 vote. (Democrat Russ Feingold voted against the bill, maintaining that it isn't strong enough.) The bill now goes to the President, who will sign it into law. Here's what's in it for you:

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Unlike the Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx, when athletes and their teams who grace the cover of the magazine subsequently encounter bad luck or disappointing performance, the appearance of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on the cover of The New York Times Business Day section had no ill effects on the nation's second largest bank, as measured by assets.

JP Morgan Chase reported earnings of $4.8 billion or $1.09 per share, from $2.7 billion during the comparable period a year earlier. Analysts expected 70 cents a share. Revenue was of $25.6 billion in the second quarter, in line with expectations.

Still, all was not rosy--the company's investment-banking division reported a 6.1 percent decline in profit on a 13 percent drop in revenue and CEO Dimon noted that the results included "the benefit from a $1.5 billion reduction of loan loss reserves -- which we do not believe represents normal ongoing earnings -- partially offset by a charge of $550 million for the U.K. bonus tax."

Profits increased in the retail financial services division, primarily due to a reduction in charge-offs and delinquencies in the consumer business. JP Morgan reiterated that consumer lending remains weak.

Prior to the release, Asian stocks fell (markets there were already closed before the JP Morgan news) and European markets were trading lower. Stocks reversed course after the report and US stock futures are now trading higher.

How strong is the Chinese economy?

What could be the world's largest-ever initial public offering might shine some light on that question.

The Agricultural Bank of China could be priced as early as Tuesday (Wednesday in China). If it hits the high end of its price range, the IPO could gobble up $23 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal ($), topping the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China's 2006 record of $21.6 billion.

If the ABC prices its offering at the mid-point, it could still sell $8.8 billion in its Shanghai offering and $11.3 billion in its Hong Kong offering (it's going public in two places).

The Chinese government, which still wholly owns the ABC as of today, might not want to price shares too high, since there have been a few IPOs that have fallen below their issue prices after its first day of trading.

That's one concern. Another is that heavyweight IPOs this year have been disappointing. In February, China First Heavy Industries became the first mainland company in some time to fail to price a Shanghai IPO at the top of its proposed range.

Also, economic news out of China have not been entirely sanguine. Its consumer price index is rising; its GDP growth this year may be slower than analysts expected. There have been fears of property and credit bubbles for a year, prompting regulators to launch a series of clampdowns on mortgage lending that democratic governments could only gawk at.

Incidentally, the primary concern with the ABC is its over-lending and non-performing loans.

The ABC's price will be a test on confidence in China's economy - but more a sign of the Chinese government's own honest analysis that it can't color with statements and speeches. How high will it dare to go?

Bank of America's mortgage unit Countrywide is being sued in Illinois for discriminating against black and Latino borrowers. According to a report in Bloomberg, Illinois's attorney general, Lisa Madigan, has filed a suit alleging that Countrywide disproportionately steered minorities into risky subprime mortgages:

"Countrywide's illegal discriminatory lending practices destroyed the wealth and dreams of thousands of African American and Latino homeowners," Madigan said in the statement. "Bank of America needs to be held accountable by taking financial responsibility for cleaning up the devastation of the predatory company that it chose to take over."

Remember that back in 2006, Eliot Spitzer, when he was still New York's attorney general, sued Countrywide for similar practices. The mortgage lender settled, compensated minority borrowers and adopted measures to prevent discriminatory pricing.

And less than a month ago, Bank of America paid $108 million to settle federal charges that Countrywide collected outsized fees from about 200,000 borrowers facing foreclosure.

And the lending unit is still mired in a massive $8-billion settlement for predatory loans in a suit filed by Madigan and involving 10 other states.

Federal prosecutors are in the early stages of investigating complex mortgage-derivatives deals arranged by Morgan Stanley, looking for any proof that the company may have misled investors by setting up the deals knowing, and wagering their own capital, on their failure, Continue »