A Missouri business owner who claimed his company had assets that would make it the second biggest corporation in America has been charged with securities fraud and aggravated currency structuring.

Federal prosecutors said Wednesday that Petro America Corp., owned by Isreal Owen Hawkins, had no income other than investor money, no prospects for fulfilling its promises and only one full-time employee -- Hawkins. And instead of being worth more than $284 billion, as Hawkins claimed, Petro America's interests in gold mines and oil trading operations were worthless, investigators said.

"A federal criminal complaint alleges that Petro America was an empty facade of a business run by deception and false promises," U.S. Attorney Beth Phillips said Wednesday at a news conference. "Petro's founder is charged with defrauding unwary investors by selling them worthless stock in order to support his lavish lifestyle."

The criminal action comes on the heels of a civil complaint filed Friday seeking seizure of bank accounts and luxury items from Hawkins and other "unindicted co-conspirators."

Phillips didn't say Wednesday whether anyone else would be charged in the case.

Prosecutors said Hawkins, 55, of Kansas City, Kan., started selling unregistered stock to investors in 2008 at a cost of $100 per 100,000 shares, promising them that "book value" of the stock would be $2 per share when the company went public.

Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron Corp. chief executive officer convicted of leading a fraud that destroyed the world’s largest energy trader, is seeking a new trial over government objections.

A three-judge panel of the New Orleans appellate court is reviewing verdicts today against Skilling after the U.S. Supreme Court determined in June that prosecutors used an invalid legal theory to convict him.

Skilling is serving a 24-year sentence in a Colorado federal prison after he and former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay were found guilty of deceiving investors about the company’s true financial condition.

“The court doesn’t act as a 13th juror” to decide Skilling’s guilt or innocence, his lead lawyer Daniel Petrocelli told the panel. “If the trial record contains evidence on which a rationale juror could’ve acquitted, that count must be reversed. Here, the record is filled with acquittal evidence.”

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.

U.S. lenders already facing intense scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators over questionable foreclosure practices will likely face class-action lawsuits on behalf of thousands of homeowners nationwide.

Bruce Simon, a class-action attorney with Pearson Simon Warshaw & Penny LLP in San Francisco, said a filing from his firm is imminent, while two other prominent firms said they were also exploring filing class-actions.

So far, most of the courtroom activity over reports of shoddy documents used by lenders in foreclosure proceedings has come in the form of defenses mounted by individual homeowners, or limited class actions filed in state courts.

However, a lawsuit on behalf of homeowners nationwide could seek a court order that would suspend foreclosures much more broadly, class-action lawyers said.

"We are all hands on deck at the moment,'' said Simon of Pearson Simon Warshaw & Penny.

Another firm, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP, in San Francisco, is set to decide "within the next two weeks'' whether to file a lawsuit, according to Eric Fastiff, a partner there. He said the firm, which is on the steering committee for BP Plc oil spill litigation and also plays a leading role in lawsuits against Toyota Motor Corp over acceleration problems, currently has five attorneys and two paralegals assigned to the foreclosure issue.

There's little argument that this week's election and Fed meeting are hugely important for the direction of the market. But what happens next?

As the lyric went in the 1970s song, "There's got to be a morning after." And for the markets and the economy, the mid-term elections and monetary easing decision from the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee will come and go, leading to a morning after and decisions to be made.

Some market pros already have their eyes on a fresh set of challenges that will arise once the Republicans stage their likely landslide and the Fed starts printing money again.

"Unlike what happened in the soft-patches of the mid-1980s and again in the mid-1990s, the economy today is just a shock away-even negative fiscal shocks-from slipping back into contraction mode," warned David Rosenberg, economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff in Toronto, in his daily note.

Here is a fast list of five factors that will influence the market ahead:

1. A Trade War

In addition to aiming at getting more money flowing in the economy, the Fed's aggressive quantitative easing (QE) policies have hammered at the dollar and riled up some US trading partners.

Another round of QE isn't likely to sit well with those tiring of ballooning US debt and the nation's attempts to keep its exports cheap by weakening its currency.

"The risk that the markets are not fully appreciating is what happens if the Fed becomes very aggressive and heavy asset purchases cause further weakness in the U.S. dollar, which then touches off a currency war ...followed by a trade war?" Rosenberg asked. "The case for gold as a hedge against this more-than-remote possibility is pretty strong."

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