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So you thought Facebook was just for the youngins? Not according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Read about this and the other stories influencing financial stocks today.

1. It’s time to Facebook friend your stocks
In a ruling issued yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (click here for the ruling itself) held that companies can use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to disseminate material nonpublic information to investors so long as the companies have told investors which outlets they use. The issue came up last July after Reed Hastings, the chairman and chief executive officer of Netflix , posted on Facebook that the company had streamed more than one billion hours in the previous month for the first time in its history. Here’s Hastings’ original post:

Congrats to Ted Sarados, and his amazing content licensing team. Netflix monthly viewing exceeded 1 billion hours for the first time ever in June. When House of Cards and Arrested Development debut, we’ll blow these records away. Keep going, Ted, we need even more!

2. Bank of America’s ongoing battle with MBIA
The legal death match between Bank of America and mortgage bond insurer MBIA completed another round yesterday after an appeals court ruled in the latter’s favor on a number of critical issues. The principal question before the court was whether B of A is only obligated to repurchase mortgages that have already gone into default. According to the court, the answer is no: “Plaintiff is entitled to a finding that the loan need not be in default to trigger defendants’ obligation to repurchase it. There is simply nothing in the contractual language which limits defendants’ repurchase obligations in such a manner.”

The court also upheld the lower court’s ruling that MBIA need not demonstrate a “direct causal link” between alleged misrepresentations by Countrywide Financial (which B of A purchased in 2008) and the degradation in value of mortgage-backed securities insured by MBIA. The implications of this ruling are wide-ranging. To read more about this, check out Reuters’ Allison Frankel’s take on it here.

3. Bank of America concludes settlement with the NCUA
In slightly better news for B of A, the National Credit Union Administration announced yesterday that it will drop legal claims against the bank in exchange for a $165 million payment. Not unlike MBIA, the NCUA had alleged that the bank “downplayed risks of poor-quality mortgages packaged into securities” that were then sold to credit unions around the country. As I discussed here, this marks a “small but important victory” for the bank in its efforts to atone for the sins of Countrywide. To learn more about B of A’s progress on the legal front, check out this in-depth series that we published in February.

4. Wells Fargo’s complete domination of the mortgage market
This is more …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

By John Maxfield, The Motley Fool

Filed under: Investing

Shares of the nation’s second largest bank by assets, Bank of America , are trading higher today after the lending giant came to an agreement with the federal regulator of credit unions. Under the terms of the deal, Bank of America will pay $165 million to settle allegations that it “downplayed risks of poor-quality mortgages packaged into securities” that were then sold to credit unions around the country.

According to prepared remarks issued this morning by the National Credit Union Administration, “As a result of the Bank of America settlement, NCUA has now successfully recovered more than a third of a billion dollars on behalf of credit unions. These settlements and our ongoing lawsuits further NCUA‘s goal of minimizing the losses of the corporate crisis and cutting future costs to credit unions.”

As the remarks intimate, Bank of America joins a growing list of institutions that have come to terms with the NCUA. In November of 2011, Deutsche Bank and Citigroup agreed to pay a combined and eerily similar $165.5 million to settle analogous claims — for the NCUA press releases see here and here, respectively (links may open PDFs). And in March of last year, London-based HSBC did the same. In addition, as The Wall Street Journal noted, the NCUA still has outstanding suits against JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs , among others.

For Bank of America specifically, this marks a small but important victory on its journey to put past transgressions behind it — primarily those of Countrywide Financial, which the bank acquired at the beginning of 2008. As I discussed at length in this series on Bank of America’s legal liabilities, while it’s already paid out tens of billions of dollars to atone for Countrywide’s sins, considerable obstacles remain ahead.

That aside, this agreement helps to clear up yet another unknown liability that’s been holding down shares of the bank. At the beginning of this year, Bank of America acknowledged that it had come to a preliminarily agreement on the settlement amount with the NCUA. But beyond the fact that the amount wasn’t disclosed at the time, it was also “subject to the negotiation and execution of mutually agreeable settlement documentation and approval by the NCUA board.” Suffice it to say, the news today puts any questions to rest.

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