With our investment news briefs, Money Morning provides investors with a quick overview of the most important investing news stories from all around the world.

U.S. Rep: Give Regulators Power to Break Up Financial Giants; GM IPO Could Come in Q4 2010, Official Says; Fed May Not Increase Interest Rates Until 2012; Wells Fargo to Buy Back $1.3 Billion in Auction Debt; GE Says Appliance and Lighting Businesses Improving; October Housing Starts Miss Estimates; DirecTV Hires Pepsi Exec as New CEO; AMD to Pay Off $1 Billion in Debt;

• U.S. Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-PA, chairman of the House Capital Markets Subcommittee revealed a proposal that would empower regulators to break up financial firms that pose a risk to the nation’s economy. Kanjorski’s plan took the form as an amendment to a bill in the House Financial Services Committee that proposed new powers for regulators to police, take over, restructure and close firms that are a “systematic risk.” Targeted at the 50 largest U.S. financial firms, the amendment would require the Financial Services Oversight Council to evaluate several factors in determining whether to take action, such as size, exposure, leverage and relationships.

• The U.S. government wants the eventual initial public offering (IPO) of General Motors Co. (NYSE: GRM) on a fast track and it could come as soon as the fourth quarter of next year, Reuters reports. "Private markets would like to see us exit this investment, and I think they will be more comfortable if we're on a sustained path out the door than if they think we're going to try to market time it to maximize return," Ron Bloom, head of the government’s autos task force told the news agency in an interview.

• Policymakers may not raise key interest rates until early 2012, according to U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard. “If you look at the last two recessions, in each case the FOMC waited two and a half to three years before we started our tightening campaign,” Bullard said yesterday (Wednesday) in a speech in St. Louis. “If we took that as a benchmark, that would put us in the first half of 2012.”

• Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE: WFC) agreed to repay roughly $1.3 billion to brokerage clients whose funds were frozen last year as the auction-rate securities market collapsed, the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) said yesterday (Wednesday). The San Francisco-based bank also will pay a $1.9 million fine and reimburse investors that sold their holdings at a discount after the market collapsed.

• Revenue and profit growth for General Electric Co.’s (NYSE: GE) consumer and industrial division are slowly improving, unit President James Campbell said yesterday (Wednesday) at an Oppenheimer Holdings Inc. (NYSE: OPY) conference in New York. Campbell expects the unit, which includes GE’s appliance and lighting businesses, to show “slight” revenue growth in 2010 and “positive operating profit.”

• Housing starts in the United States fell 10.6% in October to a seasonally adjusted rate of 529,000, the Commerce Department said. That’s lower than the expected annual rate rise of 600,000 according to a media forecast of 77 economists polled by Bloomberg News.  

• The DirecTV Group Inc. (Nasdaq: DTV) named PepsiCo Inc.’s (NYSE: PEP) Michael White its next chief executive officer. White was vice chairman and CEO of Pepsi’s its international unit, and is credited by Pepsi CEO Indra Noovi as helping boost sales abroad to almost $20 billion — more than double the amount when he took the helm of that division in 2003.

• Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE: AMD) is using a $1.25 billion settlement it received from rival Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) and a new $500 million bond offering to pay off $1 billion in debt, it said yesterday (Wednesday). AMD will put the cash toward buying back $1 billion in 5.75% notes that mature in 2012.