Good morning. The Trump administration has greenlighted its first new bank, and it is a startup that takes its name from a mountain where dwarves stored their treasure in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit.”

• The bank: Erebor Bank, which will cater to startups and high-net-worth individuals, on Friday became the first newly created bank to receive a national charter under the second Trump administration. Launching with $635 million in capital, it says it will occupy a hole in the market left by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which served California’s tech companies, founders and venture-capital firms.
   
• OCC signs off: A spokeswoman for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees national bank charters, confirmed the approval of Erebor’s charter.
   
• The founder: The bank is the brainchild of Palmer Luckey, one of the tech industry’s early supporters of Donald Trump, and its funders include Lux Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, Elad Gil and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
   
• Its focus: It has lined up a handful of potential defense and industrial tech-focused clients—including ones with ties to Thiel and other investors—who say they are eager to do business with a bank that understands their needs. Among them are companies that build AI-powered factories, a robotics startup and a space company working to create pharmaceuticals in low gravity.

Justice Department casts wide net on Netflix’s business practices in merger probe.

The Justice Department is investigating whether Netflix has engaged in anticompetitive tactics as it probes the streaming giant’s proposed acquisition of Warner Discovery’s studios and HBO Max streaming service, according to a civil subpoena viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Implications: Questioning how Netflix competes with rivals suggests the department is looking at whether its planned Warner deal could entrench its market power, or lead to a monopoly in the future. U.S. law gives enforcers broad power to oppose mergers that could lead to a monopoly.

Treasury authorizes non-U.S. companies to join Venezuela oil sales.

The U.S. Treasury said foreign companies are authorized to support U.S. businesses in the sale of sanctioned Venezuelan oil, Risk Journal’s Max Fillion reports.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control, Treasury’s sanctions unit, said on Friday that foreign firms could provide financing, insurance, repairs, logistics and other services to U.S. firms transacting with the Venezuelan government and its state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, or PdVSA. 

Friday’s guidance clarifies the scope of a general license issued Jan. 29 granting “established U.S. entities” the right to sell oil that would ordinarily be blocked by sanctions on the Venezuelan government and PdVSA.

• The U.S. Treasury aims to streamline how it vets investments for national security concerns by fast-tracking reviews for investors that regularly undergo such examinations, Risk Journal reports. 
   
• Uber Technologies was ordered to pay $8.5 million in compensatory damages after a jury found the company liable for the 2023 sexual assault of a 19-year-old passenger.
   
• The European Commission said TikTok must rework the design of its short-form video platform over concerns it is addictive and breaches the bloc’s online-content rulebook.
   
• The U.K. shut down three corporate registration providers for helping set up thousands of businesses that had no real presence in the country, Risk Journal reports.
   
• The federal health agency is referring knockoff weight-loss drug provider Hims & Hers to the Justice Department for potential violations of the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, general counsel Mike Stuart said in a social-media post Friday.

Iran threatens missile attacks, hoping Trump sees strength not weakness.

Iran’s missile program was born of weakness in the early years of the Islamic Republic. Now the question is whether it is formidable enough to head off a military confrontation with President Trump.

Tehran unleashed a barrage of around 500 missiles that struck civilian and military locations in Israel last June but did little strategic damage. Though Israel pounded Iran’s missile launchers and storage sites, the regime emerged from the bruising conflict with much of its remaining arsenal intact. More important, Iran learned how to get more of its missiles past Israeli and American defenses as the war went on.

It is threatening to fire them again on a broader set of targets around the region if Trump orders an attack. That has raised the pressure on the White House, forcing it to worry about Iran’s ability to target Israel and U.S. forces, as well as friendly Arab countries in the Persian Gulf and the wider region.

Big tech’s AI push is costing a lot more than the moon landing.

It’s bigger than the railroad expansion of the 1850s, the Apollo space program that put astronauts on the moon in the 1960s and the decadeslong build-out of the U.S. interstate highway system that ended in the 1970s.

We’re talking about the data centers now being built and financed by some of the world’s biggest companies in the artificial-intelligence boom.

Four U.S. tech giants—Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Amazon and Alphabet’s Google—are planning to spend up to $670 billion to build out AI infrastructure this year alone as they scramble to increase the computing power needed to operate and scale their AI-related endeavors.

• Here’s Where AI Is Tearing Through Corporate America

• In a world increasingly shaped by two unpredictable great powers—the U.S. and China—the world’s middle powers are boosting cooperation in areas from trade to security in a bid to ensure they don’t become roadkill in the new world order.
   
• How Chinese is your car? Automakers are racing to work it out.
   
• Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi led her party to a thumping victory in parliamentary elections, handing her a powerful mandate to deepen ties with the U.S. and rev up Japan’s economy.
   
• President Trump on Thursday said that he wants the U.S. to negotiate a new strategic-arms treaty after the lapse of the last major nuclear pact with Moscow. But he said nothing about how he hopes to constrain Russian, Chinese and U.S. nuclear forces in the months or years that it might take to draft a new nuclear pact.
   
• North Korean forces deployed to help Russia’s war against Ukraine are now operating surveillance drones, removing mines and executing artillery strikes, roles that illustrate the advancement in their combat skills after roughly 15 months of involvement in the conflict.
   
• The corporate exodus from what was supposed to be Africa’s breakout economy is accelerating, propelled by a toxic cocktail of corruption, lawlessness and poor infrastructure.
   
• The implications of U.S. sanctions on India’s Chabahar Port project caused concern in India’s Parliament after the government released its 2026-2027 national budget showing no funding for the project in Iran, Risk Journal reports.
   
• Toyota Motor’s chief executive is stepping down after a relatively short term in office that was buffeted by President Trump’s tariffs and struggles to maintain market share in China.

Join us in New York on March 4 for the inaugural Dow Jones Risk Journal Summit. Speakers include Kaitlin Asrow, acting superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services; Erika Brown Lee, head of global data privacy legal, Citi; Beth Collins, chief compliance officer, Walmart; Indrani Franchini, chief compliance officer, IBM; and Kevin O’Connor, general counsel, Lockheed Martin.

Request a complimentary invitation here using the code COMPLIMENTARY. Attendance is limited, and all requests are subject to approval.

Unsettled cyber intel law erodes private-sector trust.

After months of partisan wrangling, a temporary extension on Tuesday of legislation aimed at encouraging firms to share cyberattack intelligence with Washington might be too little, too late for corporate cybersecurity leaders.

The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act provides liability and antitrust protections for companies that share attack data with federal agencies. Created in 2015 with a 10-year sunset clause, the act lapsed twice over the past four months as lawmakers clashed over proposed revisions. It was extended this week as part of a broader spending bill approved by Congress and signed by President Trump. 

But an eight-month shelf life—and on-again off-again status—is unlikely to encourage hacked companies to risk legal or reputational damage by sharing sensitive data, especially in the wake of costly downtime, cybersecurity experts said. 

You can listen to new episodes every Friday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon.

• Grocery giant Kroger plans to hire Greg Foran, a former executive at top rival Walmart, as its next chief executive, according to people familiar with the matter.
   
• A whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is based on a sensitive phone conversation the U.S. intercepted in which individuals linked to a foreign government discussed a person close to President Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.
   
• The sons of top Trump administration officials made billions from cryptocurrency for their families, but their investors didn’t always fare so well.
   
• The Trump administration announced Friday a new strategy for overseas arms sales that is centered on boosting the manufacture of weapons most important to the U.S. military.
   
• The night Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019, he called three people. One of them was Kathryn Ruemmler.

Follow us on X at @WSJRisk. Send tips to our reporters Max Fillion at max.fillion@dowjones.com, Mengqi Sun at mengqi.sun@wsj.com and Richard Vanderford at richard.vanderford@wsj.com.

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