Midwest spot gasoline pricing discounts narrowed on Friday after news of the unplanned shutdown of a key gasoline-making unit at BP’s (BP, BP.LN) refinery in Whiting, Ind.

Trading in the riskiest mortgage-backed securities has more than doubled since the start of the year, encouraging once-shy investors to try to strike deals with motivated sellers, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) granted Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein restricted stock valued at $7.2 million as of Friday’s close as part of his 2011 compensation.

The domestic investment arm of China’s sovereign-wealth fund said Friday it will allow three major Chinese lenders in which it owns stakes to cut their dividend ratios by 5 percentage points to 35% in 2011.

The privatization of Brazil’s airports could prove to be a test of the country’s nascent long-term credit market, as investors look beyond the national development bank to fund the more than 22 billion Brazilian reais ($13 billion) that will be needed to modernize three major airports.

A computer hacker group on Friday continued a wave of attacks against Brazilian financial websites, hampering the sites of Citigroup Inc. (C) and other prominent institutions.

LONDON–The value of merger and acquisition activity in the global mining sector surged by around 50% last year to top $100 billion, helped by a recovery in transaction values in the final quarter of the year, consultancy KPMG said Friday.