Good morning. The Biden administration designated international cryptocurrency platforms commonly known as “mixers” as primary money-laundering hubs that threaten national security.

• What are mixers? Mixers are crypto platforms that enable users to exchange cryptocurrency with relative anonymity. These platforms have come under intense scrutiny in recent months, with U.S. regulators sanctioning platforms and charging their founders.
   
• What are the implications of the proposal? The U.S. Treasury Department’s unprecedented proposal—using laws usually deployed against foreign banks and foreign jurisdictions—will require special record-keeping and reporting for any financial transactions involving international mixers. The potential targeting of an entire class of transaction represents a significant regulatory step meant to shape the future of the global financial system.
   
• What's the context? The proposal comes amid increasing pressure from Capitol Hill about the role of crypto in helping finance militant groups following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
   
• What does it mean in practice? The proposed rules would ask U.S. financial institutions and financial agencies to identify, collect and report certain information related to international mixer transactions, including personal and transactional information. The official identification of mixers as primary money-laundering concerns could potentially give Treasury broad sanction authority, including the ability to cut targets off from U.S. markets.

SEC retreats from lawsuit over XRP cryptocurrency, while New York AG sues Gemini, Genesis and DCG.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday said it would drop its lawsuit against two cryptocurrency executives who oversaw $1.5 billion in sales of a digital coin known as XRP, in a move that boosts the industry’s battle against traditional regulation.

The dismissal of civil claims against Brad Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen, who were sued for assisting Ripple Labs’s sales, will likely encourage wealthy crypto defendants to fight regulators in court. At the same time, the SEC’s withdrawal from the case preserves its resources for bigger lawsuits it has filed against crypto giants Coinbase and Binance.

Meanwhile, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit Thursday against Gemini Trust Company, Genesis and Digital Currency Group for allegedly defrauding more than 230,000 investors of more than $1 billion.

FCC revives ‘net neutrality,’ proposes new regulations for internet service.

The Federal Communications Commission proposed to apply utility-like regulations to America’s internet service providers, a policy change expected to raise costs for Comcast, Charter Communications, AT&T and other blue-chip companies.

The proposal opened another chapter of a long-running dispute about how Washington should oversee internet service. At stake: Whether the FCC will expand its power to regulate some of the largest U.S. companies providing a service that has become essential to modern life.

Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Units, an independent group of international financial agencies, has suspended the membership of Russia’s Federal Service for Financial Monitoring, known in Russian as Rosfinmonitoring.

Egmont, which counts the U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as a member, said it had concerns about Russian aggression and wanted to maintain its reputation in the global anti-money-laundering space.

A court in England said Dyson won’t have to face a lawsuit in that country over claims from migrant workers who said they were subject to forced labor and abuse while making Dyson-branded products and components in Malaysia.

The court, which stayed U.K. proceedings against the appliance maker, said England is not the “natural or appropriate forum” for the claims and that Malaysian courts would be better positioned to hear them.

• Grayscale Investments is preparing to roll out its first bitcoin exchange-traded fund pending Securities and Exchange Commission approval after a legal victory overturning the regulator’s rejection of its application.
   
• China formally arrested a Japanese pharmaceutical executive who had been detained since March, Tokyo said Thursday, in a move likely to further chill business travel to the nation.

U.S. forces in Syria, Iraq, Red Sea come under militant attack.

U.S. forces in the Middle East came under attack several times this week, a potential sign of heightened aggression toward the U.S. following Hamas’s terrorist attack on southern Israel earlier this month.

The U.S.’s strong support for Israel, while civilians in Gaza are facing a humanitarian crisis and airstrikes, has prompted widespread anger at the U.S. in the region, and masses of protesters have denounced the U.S. as well as Israel.

• How the West—and Israel Itself—Inadvertently Funded Hamas
• Airstrikes, Commandos and a Siege: How the Israeli Military Is Preparing Gaza for an Invasion
• U.N., World Leaders Push to Get Gaza Aid Flowing After Biden Pledge

• Russia said it supports holding regular security talks with North Korea and China to address the threat posed by the U.S. on the Korean Peninsula, as Moscow draws closer to its partners and attempts to counter Western isolation.
   
• A few hard-hit states are trying to ease the pain on insurers by making it harder for lawyers to sue. Insurers have long complained that aggressive lawyers with dubious claims have led to higher premiums for their customers.
   
• Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell suggested the run-up in long-term Treasury yields could allow the central bank to suspend a historic run of interest-rate increases so long as recent progress on inflation continues.
   
• Spending on heating oil threatens to prop up inflation in the Northeast, home to four million of the five million U.S. homes that burn the fuel.

• The U.S. is warning businesses to be on the lookout for Iranian attempts to acquire goods—including circuit boards, aluminum tubes and gyroscopes—that could support its ballistic missile program.
   
• Judgment-preservation insurance will guarantee software firm Appian a $500 million award, despite a potentially lengthy appeal.
   
• A Houston bankruptcy judge resigned under a misconduct investigation.
   
• Ransomware attacks are increasing, and insurance claims after such attacks are rising, too.

• Republican speaker nominee Rep. Jim Jordan said he would embark on a third floor vote after a plan to temporarily put caretaker speaker Rep. Patrick McHenry in charge of the House ran into sharp objections from conservatives.
   
• CVS Health is pulling some of the most common decongestants from its shelves and will no longer sell them, after advisers to U.S. health regulators recently determined that an ingredient doesn’t work.
   
• Home sales fell in September to the lowest rate in 13 years, showing the corner of the economy most weakened by high interest rates remains in decline.
   
• Sidney Powell, a lawyer who played a leading role in the effort to reverse Donald Trump’s election loss in 2020, cut a deal to testify against the former president and others who Georgia prosecutors allege engaged in a “criminal enterprise” to subvert democracy.
   
• A cup of coffee in the majors is the term for a short baseball career in the big leagues. Now some white-collar workers are leaving the office almost as soon as they arrive and calling the practice “coffee badging.”

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