The three major credit-rating agencies benefited from giving better-than-warranted grades to risky mortgage-backed securities, a practice that cost five Ohio retirement funds at least $457 million, state officials said yesterday.

COLUMBUS -- Ohio Friday became the second state to go after the big-three credit-rating agencies for allegedly "aiding and abetting'' Wall Street in convincing investors that shaky mortgage-backed securities were safe. "Investors trust that information when making extremely important decisions,'' said Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray.

California's job market started to come out of hibernation last month. Payrolls across the state grew for the first time since April 2008, the Employment Development Department said Friday, amid signs that the national economy is climbing out of the recession. But economists disagreed on the significance of the payroll job gains, which totalled 25,700.

The three major credit ratings agencies gave mortgage-backed securities unjustifiably high ratings in return for lucrative fees, losing at least $457 million for five Ohio public employee pension and retirement funds, the state's attorney general alleged in a lawsuit filed Friday.

Platts, the leading global energy and metals information provider, today announced that its benchmark iron ore assessment IODEX 62% Fe will be used by the IntercontinentalExchange to clear a Platts-based iron ore swaps contract, which will be launched on December 2. Platts introduced to the global marketplace the world's first daily price assessments of seaborne iron ore in June 2008.

Natural gas stockpiles rose last week to a new record high, the government said Thursday. The Energy Department's Energy Information Administration said in its weekly report that natural gas inventories held in underground storage in the lower 48 states grew by 20 billion cubic feet to about 3.83 trillion cubic feet for the week ended Nov. 13.

While November new-vehicle retail sales are expected to decline slightly compared with one year ago, total vehicle sales are projected to increase marginally, according to J.D. Power and Associates, which gathers real-time transaction data from more than 8,900 franchisees across the United States.

European Union regulators on Thursday said they have charged U.S. credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's with monopoly abuse, alleging that the company unfairly demands payment for securities information numbers in databases. S&P, a division of New York-based information-services company McGraw-Hill Cos., is the only issuer of international securities identification numbers for U.S. securities.

Platts -- China's apparent petroleum demand in October jumped 10.2% from a year ago as the world's second largest oil consumer ramped up crude processing rates, even as Beijing released a bunch of positive economic data for the month.

The Energy Department on Thursday is expected to report a build of 19 billion to 23 billion cubic feet of natural gas storage inventories for the week ended Nov. 13, according to a survey of analysts by Platts, the energy information arm of McGraw-Hill Cos. The Energy Information Administration _ the statistical agency of the Department of Energy _ releases its weekly report at 10:30 a.m. EST.