(Reuters) - British police charged UBS trader Kweku Adoboli with fraud on Friday, a day after the Swiss bank said it had lost about $2 billion in unauthorized trades, plunging it into crisis. Wearing a light blue sweater and a white shirt, Adoboli wiped away tears as he appeared at City of London Magistrates Court. Adoboli, a 31-year-old originally from Ghana, worked as a director of exchange traded funds at UBS in London.

• Read more

(Reuters) - Consumer sentiment inched up in early September, but Americans remained gloomy about the future with a gauge of expectations falling to the lowest level since 1980, a survey released on Friday showed. The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan's preliminary reading on the overall index on consumer sentiment edged up to 57.8 from 55.7 the month before, which had been the lowest level since November 2008. It topped the median forecast of 56.5 among economists polled by Reuters.

• Read more

(Reuters) - Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner urged EU finance ministers on Friday to leverage their bailout fund to better tackle the debt crisis, but there was no agreement on what steps should be taken. In a 30-minute meeting with euro zone ministers, Geithner pressed for the 440 billion euro European Financial Stability Facility to be scaled up to give greater capacity to combat the problems infecting Greece, Portugal, Italy and other states, a senior euro zone official familiar with the discussion said.

• Read more

(Reuters) - Air France-KLM (AIRF.PA) has split a $12 billion order for long-range jets following a year-long competition, announcing plans to buy 25 Boeing (BA.N) 787 Dreamliners and 25 Airbus (EAD.PA) A350s. The move is part of a plan to renew the fleet of Europe's largest airline and the order could rise to 110 of the next-generation aircraft including 60 more options. EADS (EAD.PA) unit Airbus said it expected to receive 35 of these.

• Read more

(Reuters) - Stocks pared early gains on Thursday and the Nasdaq briefly turned negative as Netflix Inc (NFLX.O) weighed. The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI rose 58.16 points, or 0.52 percent, to 11,304.89. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index .SPX added 3.38 points, or 0.28 percent, to 1,192.06. The Nasdaq Composite Index .IXIC tacked on 1.35 points, or 0.05 percent, to 2,573.90.

• Read more

(Reuters) - Swiss bank UBS said a trader who had lost it around $2 billion in unauthorized deals had been arrested in London, where police were holding 31-year-old Kweku Adoboli. Adoboli -- working as a director of exchange traded funds and Delta 1 trading, according to his profile on networking site LinkedIn -- was arrested during the night at UBS's London office on suspicion of fraud, sources close to the situation told Reuters.

• Read more

(Reuters) - Major central banks around the world will cooperate to offer three-month U.S. dollar loans to commercial banks in order to prevent money markets from freezing up because of Europe's sovereign debt crisis. The European Central Bank said on Thursday it would hold three fixed-rate operations between October and December to offer banks as many dollars as they needed, in order to ease any funding crunch in the year-end period.

• Read more

(Reuters) - New claims for jobless aid unexpectedly rose last week and factory activity along much of the Eastern seaboard contracted early this month, backing the view the Federal Reserve would move soon to boost growth. However, industrial production edged higher in August and consumer prices rose more than expected, factors that could give U.S. central bankers some pause over putting in place aggressive new measures to help the economy.

• Read more

(Reuters) - Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will discuss with European finance ministers the possibility of leveraging the euro zone's bailout fund to make it more effective in fighting the debt crisis. Geithner will hold talks with EU ministers in Poland on Friday and will propose that the EFSF, the 440 billion euro fund set up in May 2010, be used in a similar way to an emergency fund created by the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve in 2008 to handle the subprime crisis, sources said.

• Read more

(Reuters) - Bank of America Corp's $8.5 billion proposed mortgage-backed securities settlement is now in the hands of a New York federal judge. But it could end up back before state court in a legal tug-of-war over who should decide whether the pact passes muster. The stakes are high for Bank of America, which had hoped the agreement would resolve uncertainty over potential liabilities tied to pools of soured loans sold to investors by Countrywide Financial Corp, the mortgage lender it bought in 2008.

• Read more