Good morning. Ian J. Stones, a British business executive, worked in China for four decades, including with big U.S. firms such as General Motors and Pfizer before setting up his own consulting firm. Then, in 2018, he disappeared from public view.

Stones has been detained in China since then with no public mention of the case from Chinese or U.K. authorities. The quiet detention of a foreign businessman who is well known within China’s business community underscores the risks of operating in the country.

• Secretive prison sentence: China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday in response to questions from The Wall Street Journal that Stones had been sentenced to five years in prison for illegally selling intelligence to overseas parties. The ministry said he appealed his conviction but the appeal was rejected in September last year.
   
• More executives locked away? The silence around Stones’s case suggests that additional foreign business people may be being held in China, unbeknownst to the broader public, with families or governments working privately to secure their release, say U.S. experts on Chinese law.
   
• Growing fears: Foreign executives have become increasingly concerned about traveling to China in the past year after authorities there questioned foreign firms and barred bankers from leaving the country. The murkiness of China’s legal system makes it difficult for foreign governments and employers to gauge risks of doing business in the country and knowing what might constitute wrongdoing.

FTC launches probe of Big Tech’s AI investments.

The Federal Trade Commission said it would investigate the growing arms race among the biggest technology companies to produce and commercialize artificial intelligence.

The agency said Thursday it had issued orders seeking information about AI investments to Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon.com, Anthropic and Google-owner Alphabet. OpenAI is the developer of ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that was released in November 2022 and now has versions tailored for business applications.

GM’s Cruise says U.S. is investigating driverless car’s collision with pedestrian.

General Motors’ driverless-car business, Cruise, said federal prosecutors are investigating the handling of an October pedestrian collision.

Cruise on Thursday said it is cooperating with the Justice Department and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission among other state and federal agencies examining the company’s handling of the incident. Cruise also released findings from a review by a law firm, jointly hired by Cruise and GM, that found a failure of leadership in the company’s dealings with regulators.

• Apple issued changes to its operating system and other offerings, describing them as safeguards that reduce risks a new law poses to consumers in the European Union.
   
• The Securities and Exchange Commission is questioning some community and regional banks about their exposure to commercial real estate in their loan portfolios.
   
• The Biden administration effectively froze the approval process for new plants to export U.S. liquefied natural gas, bowing to demands from environmental groups and angering oil-and-gas companies.
   
• U.S. lawmakers introduced a bill Thursday barring contracts with Beijing Genomics Institute and some Chinese biotech entities due to alleged connections with the People’s Liberation Army.
   
• A woman who received a payout from WWE boss Vince McMahon has accused him, the company and a former executive of sex trafficking in a new lawsuit.
   
• Crypto exchange Binance.US has been told to stop serving residents of Florida and Alaska.
   
• Regulators fined consulting firm Aon and a former partner over a calculation error that upset the finances and roiled the leadership of the largest public pension in Pennsylvania, according to WSJ Pro Private Equity (subscription required).

What recession? Growth ended up accelerating in 2023.

The recession never showed up in 2023. Consumers made sure of it.

The U.S. economy grew 3.1% over the past year, the Commerce Department said Thursday. A resilient labor market supported strong consumer spending and brushed aside a feared downturn. A year ago economists saw a recession as very likely and projected anemic 0.2% growth for the year. Instead, last year’s gain was a sharp pickup from a comparable 0.7% advance in 2022.

Desperate Chinese investors are pouring into the U.S., Japan.

Chinese individual investors want to shift their money out of the country—and they are willing to pay a big premium to do so.

The best example of their desperation: Some this week have been buying funds that offer exposure to Japanese stocks at a 20% premium to what those stocks are worth.

• The European Central Bank held its key interest rate at a record high but kept open the door to rate cuts as soon as the spring, sending the euro lower and share prices higher across eurozone markets.
   
• U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan is flying to Thailand to discuss the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping with China’s foreign minister Wang Yi, U.S. officials said.
   
• America’s spy chief prepared to head to Europe for talks aimed at bringing an end to the war in the Gaza Strip.
   
• The U.K. said Thursday it would pause negotiations with Canada on a comprehensive liberalized-trade treaty, citing a lack of progress.
   
• Salesforce is laying off around 700 employees across the company in the latest round of layoffs to hit the tech industry.
   
• Humana reported a steep loss for the fourth quarter and signaled its financial woes would extend into next year, due to higher-than-expected medical costs.
   
• Tesla’s shares have fallen more than 25% in the past four weeks to its lowest level since May and were dealt another blow Wednesday after the company reported earnings and revenue that badly missed expectations.

• More companies are reporting security breaches: Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft and EquiLend, to name a few.
   
• Some private-equity firms are sticking with natural gas despite climate-related pushback.
   
• Broadcom’s new billing models for VMWare products are making CIOs take notice.
   
• A pricing metric for Conagra dipped into negative territory, a sign that consumers are scaling back. 
   
• WeWork is wrestling with lease amendments despite trying to negotiate while in bankruptcy. 

• Wall Street has been hoping for IPOs to make a comeback in 2024. One of the first major debuts planned is off to a rocky start.
   
• Bud Light is returning to the Super Bowl with a 60-second ad representing the beleaguered beer’s biggest bid to recover from a consumer boycott last year.
   
• Microsoft on Thursday became the second company ever to end the trading day valued at more than $3 trillion.
   
• Donald Trump’s political opponents had hoped his legal difficulties would torpedo his latest run for the presidency. But a knockout blow before the election is looking increasingly unlikely.

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

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