Bank of America announced Monday that it will pay $1.6 billion to the bond insurer MBIA Inc., bringing an end to one of the most vigorously contested disputes to grow out of the mortgage crisis.

Class action litigation is beginning to take shape over allegations that major banks manipulated Libor, the benchmark rate used to calculate interest on trillions of dollars in securities globally. On Monday the federal district court judge hearing the litigation consolidated 20 class complaints, and appointed interim class counsel.

The plaintiffs lawyers' shareholder suit over last year's leveraged buyout of Del Monte Corporation finally ended Thursday with Del Monte and Barclays agreeing to a combined $89.4 million settlement. But Grant said the case will also have a lasting change on the way big deals are financed.

After months of cutting quiet deals with banks in the high-stakes Manhattan state court litigation challenging its 2009 restructuring, MBIA Inc. reached a major settlement with Morgan Stanley on Tuesday. But for some of MBIA's Wall Street adversaries, the notion that MBIA had to rely on a loan to fund part of the settlement vindicates their claims that the insurer's restructuring was a fraud.

Cisco has gotten a reprieve on a verdict in a trial that came about because one of its lawyers made allegedly anti-Semitic remarks in an earlier trial. On Tuesday, the Federal Circuit panel vacated the verdict, which came in an infringement suit brought by a small patent holding company named Commil.