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The Morning Risk Report: U.S. to Ease Venezuela Sanctions, Enabling Chevron to Pump Oil
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Good morning. The Biden administration is preparing to scale down sanctions on Venezuela’s authoritarian regime to allow Chevron Corp. to resume pumping oil there, paving the way for a potential reopening of U.S. and European markets to oil exports from Venezuela, according to people familiar with the proposal.
In exchange for the significant sanctions relief, the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would resume long-suspended talks with the country’s opposition to discuss conditions needed to hold free and fair presidential elections in 2024, the people said. The U.S., Venezuela’s government and some Venezuelan opposition figures have also worked out a deal that would free up hundreds of millions of dollars in Venezuelan state funds frozen in American banks to pay for imports of food, medicine and equipment for the country’s battered electricity grid and municipal water systems.
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U.S. officials cautioned that the deal could fall through, since it is contingent on Mr. Maduro’s top aides resuming talks with the opposition in good faith.
If the deal goes through and Chevron, along with U.S. oil service companies, are allowed to work in Venezuela again, it would put only a limited amount of new oil on the world market in the short term.
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Content from our Sponsor: DELOITTE
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CLOs Can Bridge Gap Between Cybersecurity, Business
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Chief legal officers can promote an effective multidimensional approach to managing cyber risk by strengthening relationships with other leaders and setting the tone within the legal function. Read More ›
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WSJ Risk & Compliance Forum
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Speakers at the WSJ Risk & Compliance Forum on Nov. 16 include Brian Nelson from the U.S. Treasury Department and Robert Silvers from the Department of Homeland Security, along with multiple experts on corporate risk and compliance. Sign up here for discussions on economic sanctions, forced labor, climate change regulation, whistleblowers and cybersecurity.
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New York Fed Hires BlackRock Legal and Compliance Expert
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The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has hired Richard Ostrander from BlackRock Inc. as general counsel and head of its legal group.
As part of his new role, Mr. Ostrander will also serve on the New York Fed’s executive committee and as deputy general counsel of the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee, the agency said on Monday. Mr. Ostrander, who will join the Fed branch in November, is expected to help it navigate the legal and compliance issues, particularly those related to technology, that financial institutions and markets face today, according to a statement.
Mr. Ostrander is currently a managing director of legal and compliance in trading and digital at BlackRock and a member of several of its risk and oversight committees.
—Mengqi Sun
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European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said much of Europe pays a higher price for natural gas than its global competitors.
PHOTO: JULIEN WARNAND/SHUTTERSTOCK
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European governments should consider temporary measures to curb prices in the continent’s natural-gas market, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, marking her clearest comments in support of a possible bloc-wide limit on gas prices.
Ms. von der Leyen’s remarks, in a letter to European Union leaders on Wednesday, are part of an apparent shift by the commission, which until last week had seemed to sideline the option of a gas-price cap within the bloc. More than a dozen EU member states have called for a broad ceiling on gas prices, but such a move is opposed by Germany, the bloc’s largest economy, and several others.
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A former Barbados government official has lost an appeal to overturn a U.S. conviction for laundering bribes connected to insurance contracts through a New York business.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Wednesday rejected arguments from Donville Inniss, the onetime minister of industry for Barbados, against his 2020 conviction on three money-laundering-related counts for moving bribe money through the bank account of his friend’s dental business.
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A San Francisco jury has found Uber Technologies Inc.’s former chief security officer Joseph Sullivan guilty of criminal obstruction charges for failing to report a 2016 cyber intrusion to federal authorities.
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Two top executives at Portland’s pro soccer franchises were fired Wednesday, two days after the release of a scathing report about systemic verbal, mental and sexual abuse in the National Women’s Soccer League and failures at every level to address player complaints.
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The “Rust” production team and actor Alec Baldwin reached a settlement with the family of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed earlier this year, both parties said Wednesday.
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Captured and abandoned Russian tanks, howitzers and fighting vehicles—quickly scrubbed of their Z tactical markers and repainted with Ukrainian crosses—are being turned against their former owners as Ukraine’s military advances in the eastern part of the country.
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Tech-focused private-equity firm Alpine Investors has acquired Ethisphere LLC, a data-technology company specializing in corporate ethical standards, as part of a broader push into data software.
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Cybersecurity specialists say they are stretched thin as ransomware and other attacks proliferate.
PHOTO: LUKE MACGREGOR/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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Cybersecurity specialists who respond to hacks say they are stretched thin as ransomware and other attacks proliferate, often working on multiple cases at once while trying to avoid burnout.
The stress of the job is magnified by the amount of work incident-response teams are asked to undertake, industry veterans say. International Business Machines Corp.’s X-Force incident-response unit estimates that it performed 25% more jobs in 2021 than in the previous year.
In some ways, the heavy workload naturally follows cybersecurity’s evolution over the past decade, said Jared Greenhill, senior consulting director in Palo Alto Networks Inc.’s Unit 42 incident-response business. In past years, he said, incident-responders often could only work on one job at a time as they were required to travel to the offices of hacked companies.
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The woman convicted of pulling off one of the largest bank-data heists in history was sentenced Tuesday to five years of probation and time served by a federal judge in Seattle.
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The WTO expects exports and imports to increase by 1% in 2023, down from a forecast of 3.4%.
PHOTO: FABRICE COFFRINI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
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World trade in goods is projected to slow sharply next year under the weight of high energy prices, rising interest rates and war-related disruptions, raising the risk of a global recession, according to a new forecast.
Total exports and imports of goods are likely to grow by just 1% in 2023, the World Trade Organization said on Wednesday. That would be down from its previous forecast of 3.4% and its forecast of 3.5% for this year.
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Thousands of businesses across the U.K. are buckling under rampant inflation and flagging consumer demand, adding to a growing corporate casualty list in Europe stemming from the war in Ukraine.
The conflict, which has boosted prices for energy and many other goods, threatens to send parts of Europe into recession this winter. Scores of factories across the continent have throttled back production because soaring natural-gas prices have made production unprofitable.
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The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its Russia-led allies agreed on Wednesday to slash output by 2 million barrels of oil a day, delegates said, a move likely to push up already-high global energy prices and help oil-exporting Russia pay for its war in Ukraine.
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Japan has had enough of just playing missile defense. Now it’s looking to play offense, too.
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The Financial Accounting Standards Board allowed companies to continue ignoring certain rules around modifying loan contracts and accounting for hedges of interest-rate risks as they move away from the London interbank offered rate.
Libor and other benchmarks underpin trillions of dollars of financial contracts, including corporate loans, mortgages and interest-rate derivatives. Most U.S. companies have picked the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, or SOFR, as their replacement for Libor, which is being phased out after bankers allegedly rigged the rate. Libor is set to expire June 30, 2023.
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Elon Musk has said he wants to unlock what he called Twitter’s extraordinary potential as a platform for free speech. PHOTO: PATRICK PLEUL/PICTURE ALLIANCE/GETTY IMAGES
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Elon Musk’s latest about-face over his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter Inc. has him poised to take over a company that is weaker than it was before he tried to abandon the agreement—thanks in part to his own actions. At the meantime, the Delaware Chancery Court judge presiding over the legal battle between Elon Musk and Twitter Inc. is pressing ahead with trial preparations despite Mr. Musk saying he would proceed with the takeover he had aimed to abandon.
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A loud online chorus set its sights on one of Switzerland’s biggest banks in recent days, helping spark wild trading and fanning fears that the institution, Credit Suisse Group AG, was barreling toward financial trouble. For the bank, and for investors, the fast-spreading rumors served as a reminder of the sway online forums can now exert over financial markets—nearly two years after individual investors banded together on social media to drive shares of GameStop Corp. to gravity-defying highs.
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A warehouse in Redlands, Calif., part of the Inland Empire region where the vacancy rate for industrial space is below 1%.
PHOTO: ROGER KISBY/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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A warehouse crush across the U.S. is squeezing out smaller companies as big retailers fill industrial storage sites with their growing stockpiles of inventory. Logistics and real-estate specialists say many large retailers are demanding extra room to store excess inventories, driving up costs for smaller companies and in some cases driving them out of spaces.
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Macy's Inc. has so far avoided the glut of goods that has tripped up so many retailers, like Kohl’s Corp. and Nike Inc. Macy's is rolling out new dresses, suits, boots and other fall fashions--more than half of its offerings for the holiday season will be new, in contrast to competitors that have had inventory languishing in warehouses and had to offer discounts.
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Tyson Foods Inc. is closing several of its corporate offices across the country as rising costs pressure the meat giant’s bottom line after two years of soaring profit margins.
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