The nation’s four biggest banks – Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. – said they will begin issuing covered bonds, which are secured by pools of assets such as home loans, Reuters reported. The U.S. Treasury Department also released a set of “best practices” for covered bonds to help develop the market for the securities. The new investment product is designed to help boost a slumping housing market by offering a new resource for mortgage financing. The U.S. housing market has traditionally bundled housing loans into securities and sold them to investors worldwide, passing the risk on to investors, who have turned away from the securities when the subprime mortgage market collapsed last year. Meanwhile, covered bonds collateralized with mortgages would continue to perform even if the mortgages backing them default, so long as the bank can cover the debt.

Dubuque-based Heartland Financial USA Inc. reported its net income for the second quarter as $4.7 million, or 29 cents per share, compared with $6.2 million, or 37 cents per share, in the year-ago period. Return on average equity was 8.08 percent and return on average assets was 0.56 percent, compared with 11.72 percent and 0.79 percent, respectively, for the same quarter in 2007. “In the most difficult banking environment we’ve seen in years, Heartland showed year-over-year improvement in income from continuing operations and earnings per share from continuing operations for the second quarter of 2008,” said Heartland Chairman, President and CEO Lynn Fuller, in a release. “Equally significant is the maintenance of our margin at 3.92 percent, making four straight quarters at or near this level. Nevertheless, nonperforming loans present an obstacle to current and future earnings.” Loan loss provisions in the second quarter were $5.4 million, compared with $4.3 million in the year-ago period.

Ninety-two percent of senior executives at manufacturing companies who responded to a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey said they were pessimistic or uncertain about the U.S. economy’s prospects over the next year, up from 88 percent in the first quarter and 38 percent who expressed concern in the year-ago period, Reuters reported. Several factors have caused concern, including high energy prices, declining profit margins and new pressure from workers for higher wages. They also said that the challenges they have faced in the United States have begun to spread overseas, where until now strong growth has helped them weather a U.S. economic downturn.

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index of home prices in 20 major cities was down 15.8 percent in May from a year earlier, the steepest decline since the index began in 2000, the Associated Press reported. No city in the index had price gains. Of the cities monitored, Las Vegas had the steepest decline, with prices falling 28.4 percent in the month. Prices in Miami were close behind, with a 28.3 percent drop.

Central Iowa will be one of 44 new markets where DirecTV Group Inc. is adding local HD broadcast channels by the end of the year. This will bring its total of cities with local broadcast HD channels to 121. For more information, go to www.directv.com.

Rockwell Collins Inc.‘s board of directors has declared a regular quarterly dividend of 24 cents per share, payable on Sept. 2 to shareholders of record on Aug. 11.