Good morning. Weighing costs and benefits is the daily job of a CEO. The computation that came before Changpeng Zhao in 2019 was unusual.

Zhao wanted to list a crypto coin that his company, Binance, had created on its new U.S. platform. On the plus side, Zhao’s lieutenants told him, the price of the coin might rise 20% with the listing. On the minus side, they said, the Securities and Exchange Commission might deem the listing illegal, according to a lawsuit filed by the SEC this week. It could cost $10 million to resolve. Zhao gave the green light.

That is how Zhao, 46 years old, expanded his empire: by disregarding financial rules and misleading regulators, the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission allege. Now, they are coming after him.

Currently, Zhao, or CZ as he is known to his 8.4 million Twitter followers, spends his days at his home in Dubai. He likes to take afternoon naps, he recently tweeted. In his spare time, he listens to audiobooks on double-speed while playing games like Candy Crush.

The SEC sued Binance and Zhao this week, alleging they are operating an exchange illegally in the U.S. and misusing customer funds. If the agency is successful, the actions could ultimately topple the most important player in the $1 trillion cryptocurrency market.

The United Arab Emirates doesn’t have a mutual extradition treaty with the U.S. The Justice Department has a yearslong criminal investigation into the exchange.

More on crypto: 

• Who Is Brian Armstrong? The Coinbase CEO Is Taking On the SEC
• Binance.US Was Deeply Unprofitable in 2022, Documents Show

Legislators try again to curb Visa, Mastercard fees, with broader support

Lawmakers reintroduced legislation that would give merchants the power to process many Visa and Mastercard credit cards over different networks.

The bill was introduced Wednesday with two additional co-sponsors, Sen. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, and Sen. J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican. A nearly identical bill was introduced last summer by Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican.

Risqué music at work might be illegal, court says.

Raunchy music at work isn’t just potentially offensive—it could be against the law, a U.S. appeals court said.

Playing derogatory music in the workplace could violate laws against sexual discrimination, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said Wednesday in a groundbreaking decision. The ruling allows warehouse workers to sue their employer over the playing of tunes that the workers called misogynistic from rapper Eminem and other artists.

• Instagram, the popular social-media site owned by Meta Platforms, helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content, according to investigations by The Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
   
• New York City is suing Kia and Hyundai after a rise in vehicle thefts, saying the carmakers have been negligent and have created a public nuisance by manufacturing cars that are too easy to steal.
   
• Minnesota is among a number of states considering an alternative that has sparked debate: allowing nonlawyers to provide legal advice.
   
• Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t release his annual financial disclosure report on Wednesday when the majority of his colleagues on the court did so, having received a standard 90-day extension from the government agency that makes the forms public.
   
• As a candidate, President Biden promised U.S. steelworkers he would levy tariffs on steel imported from countries that fail to meet climate obligations. That is proving to be easier said than done.
   
• GameStop shares plunged Wednesday after it terminated Chief Executive Matt Furlong and elevated Ryan Cohen to executive chairman, the latest shake-up at the videogame retailer, which has been struggling to find new ways to juice sales. 

U.K. to U.S.: We’re your top military ally, now help our economy

President Biden will meet with the U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in Washington on Thursday as the British leader looks to leverage his country’s status as the U.S.’s premier security ally to deepen economic cooperation between the two nations.

The visit by the British leader, which is set to include a joint press conference in the Rose Garden, represents White House recognition of the U.K.’s robust support for Ukraine, Sunak’s willingness to toe the U.S. line on China, and recent U.K. moves to end its war of words with the European Union in the wake of Brexit, a rapprochement Washington hopes will cement western unity in the face of Russian aggression.

U.S. and China prepare for possible Blinken visit to Beijing

Washington and Beijing are preparing for a potential visit to Beijing by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken later this month that could include a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, according to officials on both sides.

While in Beijing, Blinken is expected to meet high-ranking Chinese officials, including top diplomat Wang Yi and Foreign Minister Qin Gang. The trip would boost Washington’s efforts to restart high-level exchanges and stop the relationship from deteriorating further. 

• Smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires continued to cast a haze over populous areas of the eastern U.S., and could last for days. Polluted air sent people with asthma to their doctors, disrupted air travel and altered school schedules.
   
• Once one of Latin America’s safest countries, Ecuador has become one of the region’s deadliest. Record cocaine production in neighboring Colombia and a war among Ecuadorean drug gangs propped up by Mexican and Albanian cartels has sparked a wave of violence, police and security experts say, rocking President Guillermo Lasso’s government.
   
• The Turkish lira tumbled to a record low after the country’s new cabinet signaled an attempt to stabilize the country’s troubled economy, including scaling back an expensive effort to defend the local currency.
   
• NATO and its allies will launch the largest-ever air-force wargames in the alliance’s history next week, in a show of strength to deter Russian aggression in Europe.

• Chris Licht stepped down as chief executive of CNN, ending a tenure of a little over a year that was marked by a series of missteps.
   
• The Daily Telegraph, a more than 150-year-old, politically influential British newspaper, has effectively been put up for sale after its parent company entered a form of insolvency proceedings.
   
• Here is how the PGA Tour and LIV Golf fought each other into a merger.

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

You can reach us by replying to any newsletter, or email David at david.smagalla@wsj.com.