Tim catts

More employees of firms receiving extensive government aid will face caps on their pay, thanks to Obama administration pay czar Kenneth Feinberg (pictured).

For top-earning workers at Citigroup (C), American International Group (AIG), General Motors and GMAC, Feinberg has limited cash compensation at $500,000. The move affects the 26th through 100th highest-paid employees at the companies.

It would appear that France and Britain are on the same page when it comes to bankers' bonuses. Their leaders certainly are -- literally.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown co-wrote an opinion piece in Thursday's Wall Street Journal calling for governments worldwide to collaborate on regulations designed to rein in runaway banks. That would include a global tax on financial employees' bonuses.

Politicians, lawyers and insurance salesmen now have some company in America's doghouse: A new survey finds that Wall Street bankers are among the country's least favorite people. This suggests that while financial firms may have begun to mend their bottom lines, they're a long way from rehabilitating their public image.

Two out of every three Americans hold unfavorable views of financial executives, according to a survey commissioned by Bloomberg earlier this month. And 64% said bailing them out was a bad idea.

That makes bankers less popular than members of Congress, the poll found. And that could have interesting implications as Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS) and JP Morgan Chase (JPM) prepare to hand out some $30 billion in bonuses by the end of the year.

The battle for Diedrich Coffee (DDRX) is over. It ended Tuesday morning after Green Mountain Coffee (GMCR) beat out Peet's Coffee and Tea (PEET) with a $290 million takeover bid. Diedrich, which makes single-serving cups of ground coffee for home or office percolation, saw its stock explode this year.

Green Mountain, manufacturer of the Keurig coffeemakers in which Diedrich's cups are designed to brew, outlasted Peet's, which opened the bidding with a $216 million offer on Nov. 3.

Citi isn't getting off the hook anytime soon. But Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bancorp might. It took $3.4 billion to mend its bruised balance sheet and could need to raise as little as $1 billion to repay TARP

Tired of TARP? It doesn't sound like it's going away just yet. The Treasury Secretary gave Congress a strong signal that the $700 billion bailout fund will survive beyond its initial expiration date on Dec. 31. The government "is actually close to the point" where the program can end, but not there yet.

It's no secret that one of the biggest dangers facing banks today is that loans to builders of office towers, malls and other commercial properties are going sour at a quickening pace. Financial regulators, including Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chief Sheila Bair, have warned of the risk.

It's no secret that the financial sector is struggling. Even so, new figures from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s so-called secret list of troubled banks show an industry in increasing distress. The number of banks on the regulator's confidential watch list increased by 33% in the third quarter, to 552, the highest level in almost 16 years, the FDIC said Tuesday.

Worried about souring mortgages and other toxic assets, the more than 8,000 banks with deposits backed by the FDIC sharply raised the amount they set aside to cover loan losses, dampening their profitability. The agency keeps the names of banks on this list under wraps to protect them from debilitating runs by depositors, which could destabilize them further. However, the FDIC does publish aggregate figures derived from its examinations of their books.

There's a bidding war brewing over Diedrich Coffee (DDRX), the maker of single-serving cups of joe for home or office percolation.

Diedrich agreed on Nov. 2 to sell itself to Peet's Coffee and Tea (PEET), the java chain that is said to have inspired Starbucks (SBUX). But now Peet's has competition from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR), owner of Keurig, the maker of the machine that brews Diedrich's cups.

With regulators having seized 123 banks so far this year, one might think the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. would be looking everywhere to find potential buyers for failed financial institutions' deposits and assets. But there's one place to which they're apparently not quite ready to turn: China.

When San Francisco-based United Commercial Bank failed on Nov. 9, the Fed was weighing an application by Chinese bank Minsheng to step in and take it over. But while it considered whether Chinese regulators were prepared to oversee a bank with operations on both sides of the Pacific, time ran out and UCB was shut down.