Good morning. Wall Street regulators said Wednesday they plan to require companies in some cases to admit wrongdoing when they settle civil enforcement actions.

The announcement is a return to a policy started during the Obama administration that the Securities and Exchange Commission largely abandoned during the Trump administration, Dave Michaels reports. The SEC has historically allowed companies and individuals to settle enforcement probes without admitting or denying the agency’s allegations, a practice that has made some liberal critics question the value of its policing efforts. The Obama-era policy resulted in few settlements involving admissions of wrongdoing.

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Requiring admissions in certain cases will improve the deterrent value of enforcement actions and boost public trust in financial and government institutions, SEC Enforcement Director Gurbir Grewal said. “When it comes to accountability, few things rival the magnitude of wrongdoers admitting that they broke the law,” Mr. Grewal said at an annual SEC conference sponsored by the Practising Law Institute. “Admissions, given their attention-getting nature, also serve as a clarion call to other market participants to stamp out and self-report the misconduct, to the extent it’s occurring in their firm,” he said.

The return to seeking admissions shows how the SEC under new Chairman Gary Gensler is trying to set a tougher tone for its enforcement program. One knock on the SEC’s civil oversight model is that it allows companies and individuals to move on from trouble by simply paying fines, which often come from the pockets of shareholders. The SEC can refer fraud cases—the most serious type of allegation it investigates—to the Justice Department, which can enforce securities laws using criminal penalties. The SEC may encounter resistance from businesses in implementing the new policy. Admitting facts that violate the law can have collateral consequences for companies.

The U.S. auto-safety regulator is stepping up scrutiny of Tesla Inc., voicing concern that a lack of transparency related to the company’s advanced driver-assistance features could undermine safety oversight. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in a letter made public Wednesday, asked the electric-car maker why it didn’t issue a formal recall in connection with a recent update to its advanced driver-assistance system known as Autopilot.

Tesla’s update, released to at least some vehicles in late September, was intended to improve the ability of vehicles operating on Autopilot to detect flashing emergency lights, the agency said. Tesla made the change roughly a month after the NHTSA opened an investigation into Autopilot following a series of crashes involving Teslas and one or more parked emergency vehicles.

• Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said it would stop allowing trading involving the Chinese currency on its consumer-to-consumer platform, weeks after China made its strongest move yet against the use of digital assets. Last month, China’s central bank declared all cryptocurrency-related transactions illicit and singled out overseas exchanges, saying it is illegal for such offshore platforms to provide services through the internet to residents in China.
   
• Investors are betting the first U.S.-listed bitcoin exchange-traded fund is about to get the go-ahead. Securities regulators could rule as early as next week on as many as four applications for ETFs that will buy bitcoin futures contracts rather than the cryptocurrency itself.
   
• The judge overseeing the bankruptcy case of Johnson & Johnson’s longtime talc supplier disqualified the decisive ballots cast in favor of a cancer-victim compensation plan, ruling that most of one law firm’s asbestos-injury clients had no basis to vote.
   
• France has accused more than 100 companies, including units of Nestlé SA, of colluding not to disclose information to consumers about the presence of a chemical in food packaging that some scientists say could be harmful. 
   
• Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams named the head of New York City’s municipal anti-corruption agency to be his second-in-command and a respected white-collar defense attorney to be a top deputy. 
   
• Covid-19 Vaccine-Mandate Fight Between Texas and Biden Has Companies Caught in the Middle

U.S. inflation accelerated last month and remained at its highest rate in over a decade, with price increases from pandemic-related labor and materials shortages rippling through the economy. The stretch of higher inflation—which many economists now expect to linger—is weighing on policy decisions at the Federal Reserve and starting to have a broader impact on the overall cost of living, wages and social benefits programs.

Fed officials last month worried that disrupted supply chains were raising the risks of more persistent inflation as they firmed up plans to reduce their bond-buying stimulus program next month and conclude it by the middle of next year.

Meanwhile, the outlook for the global economy darkened as a stream of data from Europe and Asia suggested growth faltered in the third quarter, hobbled by world-wide supply-chain snarls, sharply accelerating inflation and the impact of the highly contagious Delta variant.

• Testimony in the criminal trial of Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes has shown how executives at Safeway Inc. and Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. were persuaded to believe in the blood-testing company’s claims after years of due diligence, pilot projects, consultation with attorneys and medical experts and negotiations with the startup that would ultimately collapse. What was missing from the diligence, according to court testimony this week, is that neither company spent significant time studying the Theranos device itself and testing it for reliability or accuracy.
   
• The European Union is considering new measures, including joint purchases of gas to build up the bloc’s strategic reserves, to help alleviate future energy crises like one the continent now faces. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, laid out various actions on Wednesday that could be taken at EU or national level to prevent energy price shocks, as political pressure builds on member governments to stem the higher costs.

One of the country’s busiest ports will operate around the clock in an effort to ease cargo bottlenecks that have led to shortages and higher consumer costs, a change announced by the White House as it seeks to alleviate supply-chain issues ahead of the holidays. By going to 24/7, the Port of Los Angeles will join the neighboring Port of Long Beach, Calif., which started doing a similar thing last month. Major ports in Asia and Europe have operated around the clock for years.

Expanded operations at the Port of Los Angeles would nearly double the hours that cargo can move, according to the White House. It said the extra shifts have been agreed to by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents dock workers.

• A union representing film and television crews said it would strike on Monday unless a deal for a new contract is reached with producers.
   
• The Biden administration intends to relax Covid-19 travel restrictions on land-border crossings from Canada and Mexico and will require foreign nationals taking those routes into the U.S. for nonessential reasons to show proof of vaccination beginning in November.

Years of awful returns and pressure from clients to exit from the oil-and-gas business have left fewer and smaller firms able to take advantage of rising prices and help boost production. The unwillingness of some banks to make energy loans has compounded the challenges to boosting energy supplies.

Those left are moving to increase production, but they are relatively small players who won’t be able to make a significant impact on output. Investors are steering capital away from fossil fuels and toward companies that rank high in environmental, social and governance, or ESG, measures.

• The world’s governments are unlikely to prevent dangerous climate change even if the lofty pledges lawmakers and business have laid out in recent months are successfully implemented, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday.