Just a day before its historic return to the New York Stock Exchange, General Motors confirmed Wednesday that it would expand its initial public offering of common shares by 31 percent.

The company, responding to superheated investor demand for its stock, said it will raise the size of its IPO to 478 million common shares from the previously announced 365 million. Most of the common stock will be sold by the U.S. government, which is trying to unload what is now a 61 percent stake in the country's largest automaker.

The IPO, scheduled for Thursday, will cap a stunning resurrection for an automaker that nearly ran out of cash in 2008 and lost more than $80 billion in the four years leading up to its bankruptcy filing last year.

"This is, in my knowledge, one of the most remarkable turnarounds in corporate history," said Anant Sundaram, a finance professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business.

The impasse between Cablevision and Fox over retransmission consent was bound to produce a class-action lawsuit.

A group of New York customers filed one Thursday in federal court in New York, arguing that the cable company has an obligation to give its customers rebates for depriving them of Fox News, Glee, House, The Simpsons, New York Giants football, the Major League Baseball postseason and other content.

The plaintiffs are asking for about $450 million in damages, which is about the equivalent of one month's cable bill for the company's 3 million subscribers. Here's the complaint.

This isn't the first time that Cablevision has faced a class action after channels were pulled. A suit was filed this year after HGTV and Food Network were removed from the dial, but it went nowhere because Cablevision soon came to an agreement that restored service.

In that lawsuit, plaintiffs argued that Cablevision had breached its contract with customers by making a "material change" of its service.

Sales of previously occupied homes rose last month after the worst summer for the housing market in more than a decade. And fears over flawed foreclosure documents could keep buyers on the sidelines in the final months of the year.

Sales grew 10 percent in September to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.53 million, the National Association of Realtors said Monday.

Home sales have declined 37.5 percent from their peak annual rate of 7.25 million in September 2005. They have risen from July's rate of 3.84 million, which was the lowest in 15 years.

Most experts expect roughly 5 million homes to be sold through the entire year. That would be in line with last year's totals and just above sales for 2008, the worst since 1997.

Still, sales could fall further if potential lawsuits from former homeowners claiming that banks made errors when seizing their homes make consumers fearful of buying foreclosed properties.

The Federal Reserve on Monday become the latest government regulator to announce it would be looking into whether mortgage companies cut corners on their own procedures when seizing homes.

Chairman Ben Bernanke said the Fed would look intensively to see if policies, procedures or internal controls led lenders to improperly foreclosure on homeowners. Preliminary results of an in-depth report are expected to be released next month.

Investors suing Washington Mutual Inc., the former owner of the biggest U.S. bank to fail, won certification as a class-action case of their suit alleging shoddy lending practices.

Shareholders who lost money on stock purchased from October 2005 to July 2008 can proceed with claims under a single lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman in Seattle ruled Tuesday, according to court documents. The judge appointed the New York-based law firm Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann to lead the plaintiffs' case.

The lawsuit consolidates more than 20 cases filed against Washington Mutual that claim the bank secretly lowered lending standards, artificially inflated home-price appraisals and failed to disclose its deteriorating financial condition when the loans began to fail.

John Wolfe, an attorney representing Washington Mutual defendants, didn't immediately return a voice-mail message seeking comment.

The named plaintiffs in the case include Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board, the largest single-profession pension plan in Canada, and four other pension groups, according to court documents.

They seek to represent tens of thousands of shareholders who lost money on three types of preferred stock purchased between October 2005 and July 2008 and certain securities offered by the bank in 2006 and 2007.

The shareholders argued the case should be granted class-action status because their claims are typical of what other investors experienced and are based on common legal issues.

WaMu filed for bankruptcy Sept. 26, 2008, the day after its banking unit was taken over by regulators and sold to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 billion. Before it failed, Washington Mutual Bank had more than 2,200 branches and $188 billion in deposits.

It's been almost two years since the Federal Reserve set interest rates to the current near-zero levels. The Fed has kept the target range for the federal funds rate (the interest rate at which banks lend to each other) between zero and 0.25 percent since December 2008 and has, since March 2009, repeated its pledge to keep rates low for an "extended period." That's a signal that it doesn't plan on changing its tune any time soon, experts say.

On top of record-low interest rates, the Fed has also pursued a strategy called quantitative easing, which involves buying up government securities like treasuries to push interest rates even lower in hopes of stimulating more lending to spur economic activity. The first round of quantitative easing started in 2008, and many experts believe the Fed will announce plans to begin another asset-buying program (referred to as QE2) in its next rate announcement in November. Here are four reasons why another round of asset purchases could be problematic:

Savers are hurting. The yield on the 10-year treasury note has hovered around 2.5 percent for most of the latter half of 2010. Historically, rates have been much higher. In mid-2007, when economic growth was much more robust and demand for treasuries was much lower, 10-year treasuries were yielding as much as 5 percent. Many older investors depend on the income they receive from their investments in high-quality bonds like treasuries, and faced with paltry treasury yields, many are considering whether they should take on more risk. "It forces people out the risk spectrum in order to get yield, and a lot of people that are forced out the risk spectrum shouldn't be forced out the risk spectrum," says Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. Rates can only move higher, and when they do, investors that have moved farther down the duration scale (a measure of interest-rate sensitivity) will feel the pain. When interest rates rise, the price of bonds falls--and longer duration bonds will be hit harder than others.