Good morning. Thunderstorms this year have battered the U.S. as never before, reports Risk & Compliance Journal’s Richard Vanderford, forcing businesses and insurers to grapple with record-setting levels of damage more typically found with hurricanes.

• Storms on the increase: The weather events, formally known as severe convective storms, have so far led to at least $55.67 billion in insured damage in the U.S. this year through Nov. 13, according to data from reinsurance company Gallagher Re. Insured damages from the storms had never before topped $50 billion.
   
• What this means for businesses: The onslaught of severe weather has forced businesses to adopt various strategies as they try to cope. 
   
• Closer watch on the weather: “Severe weather has been on the uptick,” said Victor Rodriguez, who Amazon hired in 2022 to serve as its first chief meteorologist. “You’re seeing a lot of companies in the industry that are hiring meteorologists, that may not have before.”
   
• Insurance effects: The weather is also impacting insurance. Businesses seeking coverage are struggling as carriers have moved to insulate themselves from the losses.
   
• Prices rise: “Risk managers across all industries are having to talk with their boards to say insurance is really expensive right now,” said Penni Chambers, vice president of risk management for real-estate developer Hillwood. “The boards are having to just essentially take it on the chin.”

Also see:

• The Bank That’s Trying to Get Ahead of the Weather

Binance penalties include a number of crypto industry firsts.

U.S. regulators’ settlement with the largest cryptocurrency exchange marked a new era in its enforcement efforts in the nascent sector, reports Risk & Compliance Journal's Mengqi Sun.

Some of the penalties imposed on Binance are a first for a cryptocurrency company, with regulators employing powerful measures typically used in the past to rein in major financial institutions.

Binance’s penalties include record-breaking civil fines for the Treasury Department, the first monitorship imposed by the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and the first personal liability charge against a chief compliance officer by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

• Inside Binance’s Guilty Plea and the Biggest Fine in Crypto History
• Binance and the End of Crypto’s Dream to Escape From Government

Elon Musk’s social-media comments spark Tesla investor backlash.

The controversy over Elon Musk’s comments on the social-media platform X reached the board of Tesla this week.

Several prominent Tesla investors are speaking out after Musk, the car maker’s chief executive, last week called an antisemitic post “the actual truth.”

• Meta Platforms sought to design its social-media products in ways to take advantage of known weaknesses of young users’ brains, according to newly unredacted legal filings citing internal company documents.
   
• Genesis Global has filed a lawsuit to recover about $689.3 million worth of digital assets that a former business partner withdrew from the cryptocurrency lender before it filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
   
• The Biden administration pushed to save homeowners thousands of dollars in closing costs on certain mortgages, part of a broad effort to slash fees and save Americans money. Objections from an obscure industry and from lawmakers helped kill the plan.
   
• Some 31,000 suspects involved in so-called pig-butchering scams have been rounded up in Myanmar—a notorious hub for such crimes—and handed to Chinese authorities since September, China’s Ministry of Public Security said this week.
   
• Chinese authorities are taking more forceful action to contain the growing financial troubles of one of the country’s biggest shadow lenders. Police in Beijing said over the weekend that they had taken “criminal coercive measures”—a euphemism for arrests—against multiple employees of Zhongzhi Enterprise.

As migration to Europe rises, a backlash grows.

Rising migration across Europe, including the biggest surge in asylum seekers since a 2015-2016 migrant crisis, is fueling support for far-right and anti-immigration parties, potentially reshaping European politics for years.

Migration anxiety in Europe. Nationalist parties that champion a harder line against immigration are surging in polls and have entered governments in countries from Italy to Finland, as anxiety rises about sluggish economic growth and crises from Ukraine to the Middle East. The far right is polling strongly in the continent’s two largest countries, Germany and France.

• EU Helps Finland Secure Its Borders Amid Migrant Influx From Russia
• Senators’ Top Target in Border Talks: Tighter Asylum Rules for Migrants

Hamas releaes over more hostages as negotiators work to extend truce with Israel.

Hamas released 17 Israeli and foreign hostages on Sunday, including a 4-year-old-girl with dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship, as negotiators remained locked in talks over a possible extension to the four-day deal that halted fighting.

• Israel’s Hostage Deal With Hamas Is a Hard-Fought Diplomatic Win but Brings New Risks
• Inside the Secret Israel-Hamas Negotiations to Release 50 Hostages
• Hamas’s Cease-Fire Game Plan: Outlast Israel and Survive

• For years, Beijing hoped to win control of Taiwan by convincing its people their economic futures were inextricably tied to China. Instead, more Taiwanese businesses are pivoting to the U.S. and other markets, angering Beijing as it sees its economic leverage over Taiwan ebb.
   
• A key symbol of a brief period of detente on the Korean Peninsula half a decade ago is now gone.
   
• A healthcare hiring boom is helping offset weaker job growth in other areas of the softening U.S. economy, boosting its chances of skirting a recession.
   
• Insiders and investors combing over the wreckage of Credit Suisse say the bank’s board, headed by Urs Rohner, was responsible for its fate.
   
• As Russia’s war against Ukraine approaches its third year, Moscow holds the advantage on the military, political and economic fronts.

ICBC’s entree onto Wall Street looked like a bargain—until hackers crippled its U.S. unit.

Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, the world’s largest bank, paid $1 for its place on Wall Street. It got more than it bargained for. 

The Chinese lender acquired a small New York broker-dealer in 2010, a move that extended its presence into the U.S. securities industry. It is now dealing with the fallout from a cyberattack this month that crippled that business and briefly triggered widespread concerns about the fragility of the largest cash market in the world.

The episode also delivered a grim reminder that hacks and other operational failures can wreak havoc on companies, drain profits and bruise reputations, particularly for financial firms that live or die based on their ability to keep customers’ confidence. 

• Stocks and bonds have surged in November. With record investor balances in money-market funds, some analysts are optimistic that they have more room to run.
   
• The litigation that could end up changing how millions of Americans buy and sell homes was hiding in plain sight for three decades.
   
• Citizens Financial Group hopes a new unit geared toward rich people will help it crack a long-coveted market.
   
• The Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East has sparked concerns about religious discrimination in the U.S., creating new fissures in a divided American electorate that could help shape next year’s presidential election.
   
• Sam Bankman-Fried, convicted of fraud in the meltdown of FTX, has traded in crypto for a new currency: mackerel.

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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