Good morning. The world’s fastest-growing major financial exchange has no head office or formal address, lacks licenses in countries where it operates and has a chief executive who until recently wouldn’t answer questions about his location.

Started just four years ago, Binance is the exchange giant that towers over the digital currency world, a crypto equivalent of the London, New York and Hong Kong stock exchanges combined. After a burst of growth, Binance processes more trades for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether each day, $76 billion worth, than its four largest competitors put together, according to data provider CryptoCompare.

The years of largely unfettered, unregulated growth for Binance in particular and the crypto industry broadly, however, are coming to an end.

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Financial regulators increasingly worry that digital assets, until recently dismissed by some as a fad, have grown so quickly they now are systemically important. In an October speech, Bank of England official Jon Cunliffe brought up the 2008 subprime-mortgage-fueled crisis and said of crypto, “When something in the financial system is growing very fast, and growing in largely unregulated space, financial stability authorities have to sit up and take notice.”

Binance is drawing the most regulatory attention. Authorities in a dozen countries have cautioned users in recent months the exchange is unregistered or not authorized to provide various services.

A former JPMorgan Chase & Co. compliance executive has sued the bank for retaliation, saying it fired her after she pointed out gaps in its anticorruption controls and raised concerns about what she believed were misrepresentations to regulators, Risk & Compliance Journal's Dylan Tokar reports.

Shaquala Williams, a former JPMorgan vice president, said in a lawsuit filed Thursday that among her concerns was whether the bank’s conduct violated terms of settlements it reached with the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2016.

Ms. Williams joined JPMorgan’s global anticorruption compliance team in New York in July 2018 and was fired in November 2019 for what the bank deemed performance issues, according to her lawsuit’s complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan.

A JPMorgan spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Lawyers for Ms. Williams declined to comment further on her claims.

The courtroom testimony that has unfolded so far in the criminal trial of Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes has given even close watchers of the company new nuggets of information.

While much of the Theranos story has been closely chronicled by The Wall Street Journal and others, the trial has revealed details about the company’s losses, its fundraising and the lengths to which prosecutors say it went to deceive its partners.

Ms. Holmes is charged with defrauding patients and investors, with the top charges carrying a maximum federal prison sentence of 20 years. She has pleaded not guilty.

Here are some of the revelations we have heard so far in testimony or seen in court exhibits.

The highest inflation in three decades is posing a new challenge for President Biden as he seeks to enact another pillar of his economic agenda while also easing Americans’ concerns about rising consumer prices.

The inflation has driven new Republican criticism of Democrats’ $2 trillion social-spending and climate plan, which the White House calls Build Back Better. House Democrats are aiming to wrap up the bill next week and send it to the Senate.

Mr. Biden has said in recent days that alleviating challenges related to inflation and supply-chain logjams remained a priority while disagreeing with critics of his agenda. He said that a recently passed bipartisan infrastructure bill would help ease transportation bottlenecks, and that the Build Back Better plan would reduce families’ costs.

• The latest fluctuations in climate conditions across the Pacific Ocean are increasing the likelihood of a La Niña winter in the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Thursday.
   
• China’s biggest shopping season is getting squeezed by the global supply-chain crunch. The annual shopping festival, known as “Singles Day,” has over the years grown from a one-day shopping event into weeks of promotions that rake in more revenue than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. While Chinese e-commerce platforms reported more sales than ever this year, the event was dampened by production snarls.
   
• A Chinese meat company’s takeover of Virginia-based Smithfield Foods was meant to be the crowning achievement for Wan Long, the former slaughterhouse manager who engineered the deal. Instead, the $4.7 billion merger has now estranged him from his eldest son.
   
• A second firm has aborted the launch of a bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund, calling the products too costly for many investors.

The U.S. audit watchdog under its new leadership is expected to provide greater transparency around inspections and increase its scrutiny of audit firms while potentially shifting how it addresses investor concerns, accountants, investors and former regulators said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, on Monday appointed Erica Y. Williams, an attorney at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, as the new chair. The SEC said it also named three new board members.

The appointments come after the SEC in June fired former PCAOB Chairman William Duhnke. The PCAOB, which regulates the audits of public companies, has battled organizational problems in recent years. A report in January said there was an “environment of fear and distrust” among the staff that led to whistleblower allegations.

For decades, Siemens AG lived in the shadow of General Electric Co., with the German engineering and technology company often mimicking its competitor’s practices and managers looking to it as a benchmark.

Now, it’s GE that is catching up with its rival’s moves.

GE’s announcement this week that it will split into three public companies follows Siemens’s strategy of spinning off some of its major divisions in recent years. Under pressure from investors, the German company shifted from a conglomerate into a company focused on faster-growing and higher-margin software and technology, shedding its healthcare and energy businesses.

• GE's Power Business Is Facing Stiff Competition as Spinoff Looms
• Toshiba, Like GE, Plans to Split Into Three Parts
• Johnson & Johnson Plans to Split Into Two Public Companies

• The co-founder and former chief of MoviePass Inc. is getting ready to test whether the popular—though failed—theater subscription service can return for a sequel with a new business model.

A coal shortage that led to an energy crisis in China is rippling beyond its borders, threatening to disrupt supply chains and farming in countries that rely on its exports of a chemical used in fertilizer and diesel exhaust systems.

India and South Korea are experiencing shortages of urea, which is extracted from coal, since China placed new restrictions on exports. It is widely used in India as a fertilizer and in South Korea to produce urea solution, which is used to reduce diesel emissions in vehicles and factories.

South Korean cargo-truck drivers say they are working to find gas stations that still carry the solution, with some having to idle their vehicles and stop work due to shortages. Prices of urea solution have soared as much as 10 times on secondhand markets, though the government has placed a ban on hoarding.

Logistics-industry experts say the shortage hasn’t had a significant impact on supply chains, but that it could if the situation doesn’t improve by next month.

• South Africa and its Kusile Power Station have also become a test case for whether rich nations can help poorer ones transition away from the dirtiest fossil fuel.
   
• Soaring energy prices are likely to crimp demand for oil in some of the world’s fastest-growing economies this year, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries said on Thursday.
   
• The Food and Drug Administration said more than 2 million at-home Covid-19 tests from Australia-based Ellume USA LLC have been recalled because of a number of false-positive results.

The Vatican is close to a deal with two private-equity firms to sell a London commercial building at the center of one of the major scandals of Pope Francis’s reign.

An investment arm controlled by Bain Capital LP and London-based property investor CIT Group Partners LLP are in talks to buy 60 Sloane Avenue from the Vatican for close to £200 million, equivalent to around $270 million, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal could be announced in the coming weeks, assuming talks don’t break down.

That sale price would mean a loss of over $100 million on the Vatican’s total investment in the commercial building, a former Harrod’s auto showroom in London’s wealthy Chelsea district.

The Sloane Avenue investment has shaken the Vatican and led to the downfall of the once-powerful Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who is now on trial at the Vatican for embezzlement and other alleged crimes, along with nine other defendants.

With global supply chains gumming up due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Chevron Corp. feared a lack of parts could cause a costly delay to planned maintenance at its $54 billion Gorgon gas-export project in Australia.

So executives hit upon a backup plan. Chevron asked a local firm called AdditiveNow to demonstrate whether the same parts could be made using 3-D printing technology.

The imported components did arrive at Gorgon in time, but Chevron was so impressed with the manufacturing specifications produced by AdditiveNow that it acquired the intellectual property for use on future projects, accelerating its 3-D printing research-and-development efforts by a year.

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