Good morning, CFOs. It’s been a roaring start to the year for corporate bond issuance. But sustainability-linked debt, a relatively new and once-hot market niche, has plummeted since reaching a peak during the pandemic.

Sustainability-linked bonds are similar to ordinary bonds, with one key difference: Their interest rates rise if companies don’t meet the environmental, social or governance targets that they set for themselves. The bonds appeal to issuers because the proceeds can be used for general purposes—unlike green bonds, which require companies to use the proceeds for a designated environmental project—and they also attract socially conscious investors.

Issuance of sustainability-linked bonds took off globally early in the Covid-19 pandemic as companies rushed to ride a wave of green investment. But since then issuance has plunged, as investors and regulators have become more skeptical of environmental promises, many of them seen as too high-flown, and others too slack to be meaningful.

📆 Earnings

• Dollar Tree
• Lennar
• Williams-Sonoma

Cisco Systems’ finance chief, R. Scott Herren, said the 3.2% rise in U.S. inflation wasn’t that big of a surprise, referring to the stock market’s reaction to the news, and said that it indicated good coordination among the world’s central banks to manage rising consumer prices overall.

“It looks like we've hit a point of stability in the last several monthly reports now,” Herren said. The Federal Reserve and other central banks’ efforts to combat inflation in the wake of the pandemic has taken some of the stress off of CFOs, including Herren, he said.

“Central banks around the world have done a pretty good job of navigating us through what's been certainly unprecedented times, to get us to the point where we are today,” Herren said.

Cisco last month sold $13.5 billion in bonds to help fund its $28 billion acquisition to buy Splunk, which Herren said is expected to close by the end of April. “We're going with a mix of term debt with obviously cash off the balance sheet and some commercial paper to get that transaction done,” Herren said. “It's a good time to keep a close eye on interest rates.”

—Mark Maurer

Archer Daniels Midland said it is under investigation by the Justice Department, adding to scrutiny over the agriculture company’s accounting practices.

ADM said Tuesday that current and former employees have received subpoenas from the Justice Department. In January ADM placed Chief Financial Officer Vikram Luthar on administrative leave after the company said it was conducting an internal probe of accounting practices, which ADM said followed a document request by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company corrected some past financial results over the years while reporting lower quarterly sales and a more-than-40% drop in earnings compared with a year ago.

On Tuesday, the Chicago-based company said its accounting review found that some products sold internally between business divisions were priced at a discount compared with their market rate.

• 3M Chief Executive Mike Roman will hand off his role to an outsider as the manufacturer grapples with costly litigation and weak consumer spending.
• Boeing’s problems are rippling across major U.S. airlines. Airlines are cutting back on flying and tempering plans to hire pilots and flight attendants as they prepare to receive fewer Boeing planes than they had planned at the start of the year.
• Exclusive: After overtaking Tesla, Chinese electric-vehicle maker BYD is running into challenges in its overseas expansion, finding that its rapid growth at home doesn’t necessarily translate into quick success in big foreign markets such as Europe.

📰 Other headlines

• U.S. Bank Regulators Weigh New Operational Resilience Requirements
• How TikTok Was Blindsided by a U.S. Bill That Could Ban It
• S&P 500 Hits New Record After Hot Inflation Data
• How the World’s Biggest Plane Would Supersize Wind Energy
• It’s a Higher-for-Longer World for Rates, and That’s OK

CoreWeave, a Roseland, N.J.-based cloud provider offering access to advanced chips, appointed Nitin Agrawal as CFO, effective immediately. Agrawal joins CoreWeave from Google where he served as vice president of finance for Google Cloud. Prior to Google, he served as CFO of Mapbox, leading the company's finance and accounting organizations including finance, accounting, tax and treasury.

The Wall Street Journal's CFO Journal offers corporate leaders and professionals CFO analysis, advice and commentary to make informed decisions. We cover topics ranging from corporate tax accounting, regulation, capital markets, management and strategy.

Follow us on X @WSJCFO. The WSJ CFO Journal Team is reporters Kristin Broughton, Mark Maurer and Jennifer Williams, and Bureau Chief Walden Siew.

You can reach us by replying to any newsletter, or email Walden at walden.siew@wsj.com.