(Reuters) - A group of mortgage investors seeking to pressure lenders to buy back potentially billions of dollars in bad loans says its ranks are swelling and it will soon deliver strong evidence that banks have treated investors unfairly. New York securities lawyer David Grais and Dallas-based Talcott Franklin on Wednesday met with more than 50 large mortgage bond investors to try to convince them to fight banks.

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(Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co and HSBC Holdings Plc were hit with two lawsuits on Wednesday by investors who accused them of conspiring to drive down silver prices, and reaping an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal profits. The banks, among the world's largest, were accused of manipulating the market for COMEX silver futures and options contracts from the first half of 2008 by amassing huge "short" positions in silver futures contracts that are designed to profit when prices fall.

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(Reuters) - Stocks tumbled on Wednesday as investors worried that markets had priced in too-optimistic expectations about how aggressively the Federal Reserve could stimulate the economy. With the mid-term elections and a Fed meeting on tap for next week, traders also moved to guard against what could be an erratic period in equities.

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(Reuters) - Demand for a range of long-lasting U.S. manufactured goods unexpectedly fell last month and a gauge of business spending plans also dropped, underscoring the economic recovery's tepid pace. Another report from the Commerce Department on Wednesday showed new home sales continued to bounce along the bottom, leaving intact expectations in financial markets that the Federal Reserve would ease monetary policy further next week.

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(Reuters) - Two top asset managers, Bill Gross, co-founder of Pacific Investment Management Co., and Jeremy Grantham, chief investment strategist at Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo & Co., lambasted the Federal Reserve's loose monetary policy and said renewed asset purchases are in danger of becoming ineffective. The U.S. central bank's bond asset purchasing program "is in fact inflationary, and, if truth be told, somewhat of a Ponzi scheme," Gross wrote in his monthly investment outlook posted on Pimco's website on Wednesday.

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(Reuters) - The Treasury does not see a systemic financial threat from the risk that banks will be forced to buy back mortgage securities due to faulty foreclosure documents, a senior Treasury official said on Wednesday. But the foreclosure controversy could put downward pressure on home prices by delaying the sale of thousands of distressed properties, Phyllis Caldwell, chief of Treasury's Homeowner Preservation Office, told a bailout watchdog panel,

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(Reuters) - ConocoPhillips (COP.N), the third-largest U.S. oil company, said on Wednesday that its quarterly profit more than doubled as crude oil and natural gas prices rebounded from a year-ago and its refining results improved. Third-quarter profits at oil companies including Conoco have benefited from higher oil and gas prices. A recovering global economy has also increased demand for fuel, lifting refining margins.

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(Reuters) - Sprint Nextel's (S.N) failure to turn around its wireless subscriber business in a period when investors bet heavily on growth sent its shares down about 9 percent. The No. 3 U.S. mobile operator promised a better fourth quarter, but did not specify if it would continue to lose subscribers or begin adding more high value, bill-paying customers again.

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(Reuters) - Every July, Microsoft Corp invites a sizable Wall Street crowd to its leafy, low-rise campus outside Seattle. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and his top managers take a half-day to explain where the world's biggest software company is going, to a generally friendly audience. This year things didn't go quite according to plan. Ballmer, CEO since 2000, talked excitedly of Windows 7, its new Bing search engine, new Phone software and the Xbox game system. But he was skimpy with details of how Microsoft would counter Apple's hugely popular iPad, a question that has been vexing investors.

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(Reuters) - Stocks fell at the open on Tuesday, a day after hitting a five-month high, pressured by a stronger dollar and lackluster corporate results. The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI was down 63.65 points, or 0.57 percent, at 11,100.40. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index .SPX dipped 6.83 points, or 0.58 percent, at 1,178.79. The Nasdaq Composite Index .IXIC fell 17.47 points, or 0.70 percent, at 2,473.38.

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