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NEW YORK (Reuters) – Wall Street fell for a third day on Tuesday on fears Europe still has failed to tackle its debt crisis, prompting worries the market is headed to new lows for the year.

Investors channeled cash into less risky assets as doubts resurfaced over the political will of Italy and Greece to push through tough budget measures and as Germany hardened its stand against providing more aid. The worries over the European debt crisis renewed fears that the global economy could fall into recession.

The S&P 500 is now down 14.5 percent from its highest point in 2011, reached at the end of April. Though investors have periodically taken heart from signs that Europe has carved out a plan to deal with its festering crisis, confidence has been repeatedly walloped every time there is a development showing that the problems have not been solved.

“We have got a shot at trading the S&P under 1,100 again,” said Nick Kalivas, an equity index analyst at MF Global in Chicago. “I don’t sense that people are really going to defend the market until something like that occurs.”

A similar pattern of fractured confidence exists in bank stocks. Major U.S. banks were among the biggest decliners on Tuesday, with the KBW Bank index off nearly 2 percent. Late on Friday, the Federal Housing Finance Agency sued 17 large U.S. banks over subprime mortgage-backed bonds, compounding fears about the health of the sector.

JPMorgan and Bank of America, both subjects of the suit, fell more than 3 percent on Tuesday.

The CBOE Volatility Index, or Vix, a measure of expected market turbulence, posted its biggest gain in nearly two weeks, climbing 9.4 percent to 37.08.

“Right now there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty,” said Michael Sheldon, chief market strategist at RDM Financial in Westport, Connecticut. “There is a decent chance that we are in a bear market.”

The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 100.96 points, or 0.90 percent, to 11,139.30. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index fell 8.73 points, or 0.74 percent, to 1,165.24. The Nasdaq Composite Index lost 6.50 points, or 0.26 percent, to 2,473.83.

Traders are monitoring lows set by major global indexes during the selloff in the first half of August. So far, only Germany’s DAX, down nearly 25 percent this year, and Japan’s Nikkei have fallen below those levels.

The S&P 500 hit a 2011 low of 1,101 on August 9.

European shares extended losses on Tuesday, after falling more than 4 percent on Monday, hitting their lowest close in more than two years on worries the euro zone debt crisis was deteriorating. The PHLX Europe sector index slumped 3.5 percent. U.S.-listed shares of Credit Suisse fell 12.9 percent to $23.84.

Gold stocks got a lift as the price of gold jumped to a record high above $1,920 after Switzerland pegged its currency to the euro in an effort to prevent its rapid appreciation in an extended spat of safe-haven buying. The precious metal then retreated 2 percent from that level as investors took profits.

The Arca Gold Bugs index, which measures the performance of 16 U.S.-listed gold miners, rose 0.6 percent. Eldorado Gold Corp was the biggest percentage gainer, up 2.4 percent to $21.36.

The Financial Times reported several big U.S. banks, in talks with state officials on settling claims of improper mortgage practices, were offered a deal to limit legal liability in return for a multibillion-dollar payment.

Several brokerages including Nomura cut their price targets on big lenders.

Bank of America Corp lost 3.6 percent to $6.99 and JPMorgan Chase & Co fell 3.4 percent to $33.44.

Among gainers, Sunoco Inc rose 5.3 percent to $38.03 after the energy company said it plans to exit its refining business and focus on its logistics operations.

Packaging company Temple-Inland Inc jumped 25 percent to $30.85 after International Paper Co agreed to buy it for $32 per share. International Paper rose 8.9 percent to $27.77.

Trading volume was lower than usual at 7.9 billion shares on the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.

Decliners beat advancers by nearly than three-to-one on the New York Stock Exchange. On Nasdaq, decliners beat advancers by about two-to-one.

(Reporting by Edward Krudy; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (Reuters) – Bank of America Corp (BAC.N), which has lost almost half of its market value this year, announced a broad reorganization on Tuesday that includes the departure of two senior executives.

The biggest U.S. bank said after the market closed that Joe Price, head of consumer banking, and Sallie Krawcheck, head of global wealth and investment management, have left. Price was a former chief financial officer of the company, and Krawcheck was a former CFO of Citigroup, leader of its Smith Barney brokerage unit and frequently touted as the highest ranking woman in the financial services industry.

Chief Executive Brian Moynihan named commercial banking head David Darnell and investment banking head Tom Montag, a former Goldman Sachs executive, to new positions as co-chief operating officers.

The changes are effective immediately, the company said. A bank spokesman said neither Moynihan nor the executives involved in the shifts were available for comment.

Investors did not seem convinced that the reorganization indicates Moynihan now has a steady hand on the controls of a company battling a barrage of litigation and loan losses.

BofA stock inched up to $7.03 in after-hours trading after closing at $6.99 on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

“It seems apparent Moynihan is under pressure to make some bold moves,” said David Dietze, chief investment strategist at Point View Financial Services in Summit, New Jersey, which owns BofA shares. “Obviously there is disagreement among people at the top who have lots of options and lots of experience.”

The shake-up comes less than two weeks after billionaire investor Warren Buffett invested $5 billion in the bank’s preferred stock and after the company announced it would shed 3,000 jobs this quarter. The moves only temporarily arrested a share-price decline as investors fear the bank remains on the hook for billions of dollars of mortgage-related losses.

Krawcheck and Price managed key parts of the company’s Merrill Lynch operations, which Bank of America bought during the financial crisis and has proven to be one of its most profitable businesses. Both, however, were closely allied with Moynihan’s predecessor Kenneth Lewis, whose purchase of Countrywide Financial Corp is responsible for much of its continuing losses.

NEW ROLES, NEW BAR SET

In their new roles, Darnell — a veteran commercial banker who also worked closely with Moynihan — will oversee consumer banking operations, including the Merrill Lynch retail brokerage operations. Montag will run divisions that work with corporate and institutional customers.

“Moynihan has just raised the bar for a small group of executives, including those loyal to former CEO Lewis, to step up and resolve the sins of the past in a more decisive and effective manner,” said Todd Hagerman, a banking analyst at Sterne, Agee & Leach.

The reorganization comes as Bank of America hustles to shed assets to bolster its capital base and continues battling lawsuits related to its 2008 purchase of Countrywide, once the nation’s largest home lender.

The Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank paid $2.5 billion to buy Countrywide, but writedowns and legal costs have pushed the estimated cost of that purchase to more than $30 billion.

Krawcheck, who was in charge of the Merrill Lynch brokerage unit as well as of U.S. Trust and other private banking units, was recruited by Lewis in August 2009. When he was forced into early retirement in September 2009, she was touted as a candidate for the top job that eventually went to Moynihan.

She faced a daunting task in trying to harmonize various wealth management units that were largely competing to sell products and services to the same constituency of wealthy individual investors.

“It was never clear that Sallie Krawcheck gained traction with the retail salesforce,” said Jonathan Finger, managing partner at Finger Interests Ltd, a Houston-based investment management firm that owns Bank of America shares. “I’m not sure she ever had the respect of the bank’s retail brokers.”

Like Krawcheck, Price was once viewed as a possible successor to Lewis. However, he has been dogged by questions about his role in negotiating the Merrill purchase in the heart of the 2008 financial crisis. The Securities and Exchange Commission accused the bank of failing to disclose to investors $15.8 billion of losses that Merrill was to declare in the fourth quarter of 2008, even as it was paying out $3.6 billion of employee bonuses.

Bank of America paid $150 million to settle the SEC’s civil lawsuit. The bank, Price and Lewis still face a civil fraud lawsuit by the New York attorney general’s office over its allegedly inadequate disclosures.

Montag’s ascendancy complements his meteoric rise at the bank. He was recruited to head Merrill’s sales and trading operations from Goldman Sachs in 2008 by then Merrill CEO John Thain, who was expecting Montag to reverse the company’s massive mortgage-backed securities losses.

Within weeks of his August arrival, Thain was forced to arrange a sale of the company to Bank of America. Montag, nevertheless, received more than $50 million guaranteed under a recruitment contract that kept on giving. In 2009, he was BofA’s highest paid executive, earning $29.9 million in total compensation that reflected a stock grant of about $20 million under the contract.

He also acquired notoriety last year when a Senate investigative committee released reams of emails and other documents from Goldman Sachs as part of its probe of the company’s creation and sale of complex mortgage-backed securities that allegedly benefited Goldman at the expense of some of its clients. Montag wrote many of the emails, including one that famously described a collateralized debt obligation the company sold in 2007 as one “shitty” deal. That security lost 80 percent of its value.

A two-decade veteran of Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Montag graduated from Stanford University and earned an MBA from Northwestern University.

(Additional reporting by Joe Rauch, Jed Horowitz, Clare Baldwin and Jonathan Stemple; editing by Carol Bishopric, Bernard Orr)

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