Good morning. The Securities and Exchange Commission wants activist shareholders to pipe down.

The commission has put out new guidance that will make it harder for activists to demand shareholder votes on proposals that touch on charged social issues. The move, a reversal of Biden-era policy, comes as activist groups on the left and right turn to the corporate sphere to fight culture-war battles on topics such as climate, guns and abortion.

• Gatekeeper role: The SEC operates as a gatekeeper of which proposals can go forward. Under the guidance released Wednesday, corporations will now be able to block more proposals on some socially and ethically charged issues from being included in proxy statements, effectively stopping them from being put to a general shareholder vote.
   
• Examples in the past year: Shareholders wanted bank JPMorgan Chase to audit the impacts of its climate policy, and questioned whether food-and-beverage maker PepsiCo had discriminated against white employees. Oil-and-gas company Exxon sued after shareholders used what it called a “Trojan horse” strategy to deliberately hurt its business with an allegedly bad faith proposal to slash carbon emissions.
   
• Nonbinding, but far reaching: For some politically or socially motivated groups, the shareholder proposal process can be a way to push debate on a hot-button issue onto a major corporation’s agenda with relatively little expenditure. Shareholders are allowed to bring forward a proposal even if they hold a relatively small number of shares, in some circumstances as little as $2,000 in market value.

Russian bitcoin exchange co-founder to be freed in deal for American’s release.

The Russian co-founder of a popular bitcoin exchange will be released from U.S. custody Wednesday, a day after a deal between Washington and Moscow freed American Marc Fogel, a U.S. official said.

Alexander Vinnik, the co-founder of BTC-e, is in U.S. custody in California and being prepared for transport to Russia, the official said. A lawyer for Vinnik confirmed that his family had been informed he was getting ready to be sent to Russia.

• American Detainee Marc Fogel Arrives in U.S. Following Release From Russian Custody

Are Trump’s attempts to overhaul the federal workforce legal?

President Trump enjoys considerable power to reshape and shrink the federal workforce, but his administration’s swift actions so far have raised legal questions about the outer bounds of his authority.

Layoffs, targeted firings, buyouts and the removal of independent officials are constrained by a complex web of civil-service rules, federal laws and constitutional guarantees—all of which will face legal tests in the coming months.

Meanwhile, eight inspectors general fired by President Trump in late January filed a lawsuit against the administration Wednesday alleging their termination violated the law, adding to dozens of other legal challenges facing the president at the start of his new term.

• Key Democrats are calling on the heads of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and others to safeguard the sensitive data they hold after the Trump administration threw one of the nation’s banking regulators into turmoil.
   
• Elon Musk’s X has agreed to pay about $10 million to settle a lawsuit that Donald Trump brought against the company and its former chief executive, according to people familiar with the matter.
   
• Sean Combs is suing NBCUniversal, Peacock and production company Ample over a documentary released this year about the life of the hip-hop mogul. In the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in New York, his attorneys allege that the film contains defamatory statements against Combs.
   
• The U.K.’s competition regulator plans to speed up its reviews of large deals in a response to pressure to help boost the country’s economy.

Inflation heated up in January, freezing the Fed.

Consumer prices rose briskly in January, extending a recent pattern of increases at the start of the year that likely derails the prospect for Federal Reserve rate cuts anytime soon.

The Labor Department said Wednesday that prices rose last month 0.5% from December on a seasonally adjusted basis. That was the largest monthly increase since August 2023 and well ahead of economists’ expectations for a milder increase of 0.3%.

The gain pushed 12-month inflation to 3% in January. That marked a pickup from December, when prices rose 2.9%.

• Inflation Helped Trump Get Elected. Now It’s His Problem.

• U.S. intelligence agencies concluded during the final days of the Biden administration that Israel is considering significant strikes on Iranian nuclear sites this year, aiming to take advantage of Iran’s weakness, officials familiar with the report said.
   
• President Trump said he and Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Wednesday had agreed to open immediate talks to end the war in Ukraine in a “lengthy and highly productive phone call” between the two leaders.
   
• President Trump’s never-ending tariff threats have cast a layer of uncertainty across Canada.
   
• The U.K. economy grew only slightly at the end of last year as the country braces for the impact of higher U.S. tariffs on global demand for its exports.
   
• Factories in the eurozone produced less at the end of last year, quashing signs of recovery seen earlier in the quarter.
   
• The International Energy Agency modestly raised its forecast for global oil-demand growth and said improved compliance with output quotas among members of the OPEC+ alliance is reducing a projected supply surplus in the market.

• When President Trump called her last week, President Claudia Sheinbaum was prepared to speak with a U.S. leader who wouldn’t yield on tariffs. Instead, she negotiated a deal that world leaders are studying for their own trade talks with the U.S. How Mexico’s leader is writing the playbook for handling Trump. 
   
• Of all the countries that put tariffs on U.S. products, President Trump says India is king. Ahead of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to Washington this week, New Delhi has been trying to lose that crown.
   
• The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Trump administration Wednesday for access to migrants transported from the U.S. mainland to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, arguing that the government is denying rights the detainees may have under the Constitution and federal law.
   
• Elon Musk said he would withdraw his $97.4 billion bid for the nonprofit that controls OpenAI if the board stopped its conversion to a for-profit company.
   
• Israel and Hamas have agreed to resolve a dispute that threatened to derail their fragile cease-fire after humanitarian equipment began entering Gaza on Thursday and Hamas backed off on a threat that it wouldn’t release any more Israeli hostages.

Follow us on X at @WSJRisk. Follow Risk & Compliance editor David Smagalla @DSmagalla_DJ and reporters Mengqi Sun @_MengqiSun and Richard Vanderford @VanderfordRich.

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