The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said it would be ramping up its efforts against brokers who sell high risk products like emerging market "frontier" funds to investors of lesser means, the Financial Times reported.

The Thomson Reuters/PayNet Small Business Lending Index showed that small businesses in the US increased their borrowings in November 2013 compared to that of the previous year, Reuters reported.

The top dealmaker for Canadian retail mergers and acquisitions for 2013 is the Royal Bank of Canada, data from Bloomberg revealed. RBC has held the top spot for the third straight year.

The African private equity industry in Africa may be young and subject to various shortcomings but political stability, infrastructure growth and increasing consumer activity has given it a more positive outlook for this year, the Financial Times reported.

Data from Cambridge Associates showed that 2013 was a good year for private equity as they returned $120 billion to their institutional backers, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

Indian companies were able to get private equity deals worth $10.68 billion in 2013, an increase of 12% in value terms compared to that of the previous year.

The global private equity industry closed 2013 with "dry powder" amounting to $1.074 trillion, a figure much higher than the previous record high of $1.067 billion posted before the 2008 global financial crisis.

Private equity companies are buying the debt of the companies they own so they can become creditors and have a second shot at making money on their investments.

U.S. stocks closed out their best year in more than 15 on Tuesday, rising modestly on a strong consumer confidence reading that kept 2013's upward bias intact to the end.

Private equity firms are increasingly seeking to partner with U.S. companies rather than buying them outright, as they struggle to find ways to put their huge piles of money to work at a time when frothy markets have made takeovers expensive.