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    Kevin McCarthy’s Business Ties Complicate His Rise to Power

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    To land the House speaker position, the California Republican will have to win over opponents who question his ties to Silicon Valley and his commitment to right wing causes.The House, divided.Michael Reynolds/EPA, via ShutterstockKevin McCarthy, Inc.Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, is still working on landing the House speaker gig after six failed attempts. It’s the first such House floor showdown in a century, and business is at the heart of his woes.Mr. McCarthy’s critics say he’s too friendly with Big Tech. The ultraconservatives who have stymied his rise to power list a number of big objections with Mr. McCarthy. They say that he isn’t sufficiently committed to right-wing causes and that he hasn’t pushed back enough against perceived anti-conservative bias on social media. Yet the would-be speaker published a policy proposal over the summer to “Stop the Bias and Check Big Tech” if Republicans took control of the House.Mr. McCarthy’s messaging has not convinced hard-line party members. His hot-and-cold ties to Silicon Valley haven’t helped his standing either. Jeff Miller, a political adviser to Mr. McCarthy, also represents Apple and Amazon, and two former staff members are now Big Tech lobbyists. Meanwhile, Mr. McCarthy has benefited from tens of thousands of dollars in donations from tech companies and executives.The Republican leader has also alienated onetime corporate allies. Lobbyists once bet big on Mr. McCarthy, but relations have soured somewhat after he embraced former President Donald Trump’s antagonistic approach to corporations with perceived ties to the left.The Chamber of Commerce endorsed 23 Democrats for the House in 2020 and 15 won. That put the speakership out of reach for Mr. McCarthy at that time and he’s reportedly been sore since. The Republican pushed for Suzanne Clark, the Chamber’s C.E.O., to be removed but the organization was unmoved, and issued a statement in support of her.Even before Mr. McCarthy’s failure this week, lobbyists were giving up on him and Washington insiders — including Paul Ryan, the former Republican House speaker now at the executive advisory firm Teneo — were telling executives to stay out of the political fray.Meanwhile, the business of the government is stuck. Until Republicans resolve their internal conflicts, the House is at a standstill. Members have not been sworn in, administrative tasks and constituent services have been delayed and legislative work is on the back burner. Mr. McCarthy and his allies held talks with the holdouts last night to find a resolution. Democrats could step in to help (members of both parties have apparently discussed it), but that doesn’t appear to be on the table right now.Mr. McCarthy has vowed to continue for as long as it takes. In 1923, it took nine ballots to elect a speaker. The House is scheduled to meet again at noon.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING The Justice Department moves to seize Robinhood stock tied to Sam Bankman-Fried. Federal prosecutors argued on Wednesday that the $465 million worth of shares in the online brokerage weren’t part of the FTX bankruptcy estate. Bankman-Fried bought the shares through an investment vehicle with money borrowed from Alameda Research, FTX’s trading affiliate.Walgreens will sell abortion pills. The pharmacy giant said it would dispense mifepristone, becoming the first national chain to do so after the F.D.A. announced new rules for dispensing the drug. CVS and Rite Aid said they were still reviewing the agency’s new policy.China defends its handling of the Covid outbreak. Facing criticism from the World Health Organization and President Biden over the accuracy of its coronavirus tally, Beijing fired back on Thursday, saying the situation was “controllable.” It also plans to reopen its border with Hong Kong on Sunday after a three-year closure.The man behind the college admissions scandal is sentenced. Rick Singer, whom prosecutors accused of orchestrating a $25 million cheating scheme that involved actors, business executives, doctors and more, must serve three and a half years in prison. Singer, who had become an informant, received the longest sentence of anyone tied to the scandal.CES kicks off today. Enormous crowds are expected to return to the tech trade show in Las Vegas this year, after the pandemic clamped down on in-person attendance. Expect plenty of announcements about new televisions, smart-home gadgets, electric cars and more.The bleeding continues at Big Tech Amazon said on Wednesday that it would drastically expand its planned layoffs to a staggering 18,000 jobs as it seeks to rein in costs. Coupled with Salesforce’s plans to lay off about 8,000 employees, it’s the latest sign that tech giants are still grappling with the consequences of overhiring during the pandemic boom.Amazon’s cuts amount to around 6 percent of its corporate work force and will be focused on human resources and what the e-commerce giant calls its Stores division: its main online site, its field operations and warehouses, its physical stores and other consumer teams. (Hourly warehouse workers aren’t part of the tally.) That’s up from the roughly 10,000 the company had been weighing earlier.Salesforce is also laying off 10 percent of its employees and cutting back on office space. The move comes after a series of shake-ups at the business software giant, including the announced departures of Bret Taylor, its co-C.E.O. (reportedly after strains in his relationship with Marc Benioff, the company’s co-founder) and Stewart Butterfield, the C.E.O. of Slack, the messaging app Salesforce bought for nearly $28 billion.It’s a notable retrenchment for Salesforce, whose reputation over the past decade has become one of ever-growing ambition: The company is the largest private employer in San Francisco, and its flagship office tower is the city’s tallest.Both rounds of layoffs arose out of overexpansion. Amazon more than doubled its work force during the pandemic, to 1.5 million, as it became an indispensable seller to locked-down households. Salesforce nearly doubled its head count over the past three years, to 80,000 in October.Those hiring sprees have since run into a slowing global economy, with Amazon having warned in the fall that it could see its worst growth rate since 2001. “We hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that,” Benioff wrote in a letter to employees.Amazon and Salesforce aren’t alone: Meta recently laid off 13 percent of its work force, while Snap and Twitter have also resorted to huge job cuts. Overall, the tech industry laid off over 153,000 workers last year, according to Layoffs.fyi. Things may not get better this year, with analysts cautioning that tech companies’ customers may further clamp down on spending, potentially leading to yet more cost cuts.“The parallels with Russia and Ukraine are hard to ignore. We must not make the same mistakes with Xi Jinping that we did with Vladimir Putin.” — Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary general of NATO, urged a robust and unified response to deter China from attacking Taiwan. His comments, made during a visit to Taipei, highlighted worries in Europe over China’s growing assertiveness in Asia.The Fed’s big challenge: exuberant marketsInvestors got the post-Christmas “Santa Claus rally” they were hoping for, a buying spree that was fueled in part by slumping energy prices. But the big cloud hanging over markets remains: the prospect that central banks will be emboldened to tame inflation with more interest rate increases.Fed officials gave investors an unambiguous warning on Wednesday: Don’t start pricing in a dovish pivot anytime soon. Many on Wall Street are banking on the U.S. central bank to end its policy of jumbo rate increases in the first half of 2023, and to begin cutting by year-end.But the Fed sees any pivot prediction as misguided, warning that such thinking could complicate its efforts to bring prices under control. Minutes from a December Fed meeting released on Wednesday, did not mince its words. “No participants anticipated that it would be appropriate” to cut rates.As the Times’s Jeanna Smialek reported, policymakers are concerned that markets might misinterpret any decision to slow the pace of rate moves in the near term as a sign that the Fed believed it was making enough progress in bringing inflation closer to its 2 percent target. (The I.M.F. has also weighed in, saying that it doesn’t believe the U.S. has “turned the corner on inflation yet” and that the Fed should “stay the course.”)The markets still don’t seem to be getting the message. “Right now data signals are mixed — like an ink blot, investors can see what they want,” Elsa Lignos, RBC Capital Market’s global head of FX Strategy, said in a note to clients this morning. She pointed out that manufacturing prices were in decline, but that job vacancies remained elevated, suggesting wages could continue creeping higher.A late-afternoon surge on Wednesday helped the S&P 500 and Nasdaq close higher. Between the Dec. 27 open and Wednesday’s close, the S&P 500 rose 0.8 percent, capping off the seventh consecutive annual Santa rally, measured by the stock market’s performance over the seven trading days that follow Christmas. The most bullish on Wall Street see such rallies as a sign that investors will keep buying well into the new year.Investors and Fed officials will be closely watching Friday’s jobs report. The Fed is concerned that the labor market is still too tight, belying the recent headline-grabbing layoffs at tech giants. A jobs report showing big gains in wages and hiring could force the Fed to remain locked in to its “higher for longer” rates policy, adding to additional market volatility.THE SPEED READ DealsShares in GE HealthCare Technologies rose 8 percent in their debut on Wednesday, after being spun off from General Electric. (Bloomberg)Western Digital has reportedly resumed talks to buy Kioxia, a Japanese memory chip maker. (Bloomberg)A unit of Tokyo Gas is said to be in advanced talks to buy the U.S. natural gas producer Rockcliff Energy for about $4.6 billion. (Reuters)Fanatics reportedly plans to divest its 60 percent stake in Candy Digital, a sports N.F.T. company. (CNBC)PolicyEuropean regulators fined Meta 390 million euros after finding it had illegally forced users to effectively accept personalized ads. (NYT)The S.E.C. has objected to Binance.US’s $1 billion bid to purchase the bankrupt crypto lender Voyager Digital. (Reuters)Silvergate, a bank, was forced to sell assets at a steep loss to cover $8.1 billion in customer withdrawals after the collapse in November of FTX. (WSJ)Best of the restA self-described Tesla fan filed a Tesla trademark for a boat and jet without the company’s knowledge. (Bloomberg)Amazon, SiriusXM and Spotify are cutting back on their spending on new podcasts. (Bloomberg)The stars of the 1968 film “Romeo and Juliet” sued the movie’s distributor, Paramount, for $500 million over being made to film a nude scene while they were teens. (NYT)A Princeton student said he had created a program to detect whether an essay was written by the A.I. chatbot ChatGPT. Meanwhile, New York City’s education department banned the use of ChatGPT on some city devices and internet networks. (Insider, Chalkbeat New York)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      Restaurateur, Political Donor, Tipster: The Many Roles of FTX’s Ryan Salame

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      The co-chief executive of an FTX unit who told regulators about wrongdoing at the exchange was a big Republican donor. He also bought restaurants.In Western Massachusetts, Ryan Salame was known as a local boy turned hometown hero who struck gold as a top executive at FTX, the now-collapsed cryptocurrency exchange, and used some of that wealth to buy a few small restaurants in the area.In Washington, D.C., Mr. Salame was hailed as a “budding Republican megadonor,” bankrolling candidates and political action committees, and establishing FTX’s presence as a crypto heavyweight invested in shaping the regulation of the nascent industry.Now, Mr. Salame has emerged as a central player in the scandal surrounding FTX after he told regulators in the Bahamas, where the exchange was based, that FTX was misappropriating billions in customer funds to prop up an allied crypto trading firm called Alameda Research.On Monday, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas, accused of lying to investors, lenders and customers about the close financial dealings between FTX and Alameda, and committing fraud by using both companies as a “piggy bank.” Prosecutors said Mr. Bankman-Fried used customer funds to trade, buy expensive real estate, invest in other crypto firms, make political contributions and extend personal loans to executives.So far, Mr. Bankman-Fried, who is being held without bail in a Bahamas prison, is the only FTX executive charged with wrongdoing. But Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, said the investigation is continuing and prosecutors are not done charging individuals.Mr. Salame’s activities may be scrutinized, given that he was pivotal to FTX’s political influence operation along with Mr. Bankman-Fried. Mr. Salame, a former co-chief executive of FTX Digital Markets, the company’s subsidiary in the Bahamas, also received a $55 million personal loan from Alameda.Mr. Salame (pronounced Salem) did not return multiple requests for comment. His lawyer, Jason Linder at Mayer Brown, also did not return requests for comment.Born in Sandisfield, Mass., a town of just 1,000 people in the Berkshires, Mr. Salame worked briefly at the accounting giant EY. In 2019, he graduated from Georgetown University with a master’s in finance before landing a job at Alameda in Hong Kong. He later moved to FTX in the Bahamas, where he was a primary point of contact between the exchange and the local government.Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas on Monday.Mario Duncanson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Salame was not in Mr. Bankman-Fried’s inner circle, but he was fiercely loyal to him, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Bankman-Fried and his closest advisers all shared a purported commitment to giving away most of the money they made under the banner of “effective altruism.”By contrast, Mr. Salame said at times that he was in crypto because it was a way to get rich, according to a person who knows him. He enjoyed expensive cars, flew on private jets and had a reputation for hard partying.What to Know About the Collapse of FTXCard 1 of 5What is FTX? More

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      FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s “House of Cards” Teeters

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      Now under arrest, the fallen crypto mogul faces a barrage of charges, including defrauding investors out of billions.Sam Bankman-Fried faces multiple charges, including defrauding investors.Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesS.B.F. in custody The spectacular rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the failed crypto exchange FTX, came full circle on Monday, with his arrest in the Bahamas at the request of U.S. authorities, followed by the S.E.C. filing its own charges on Tuesday.The Times reports that federal prosecutors in Manhattan, who are seeking his extradition, will charge Mr. Bankman-Fried with wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy and money laundering. A trial could start late next year.“Sam Bankman-Fried built a house of cards on a foundation of deception while telling investors that it was one of the safest buildings in crypto,” Gary Gensler, the S.E.C.’s chair, said in a statement. His agency has charged S.B.F., as the entrepreneur is known, with defrauding investors in FTX out of $1.8 billion, including $1.1 billion from U.S. entities. A big part of the fraud, it alleges, was keeping backers in the dark about “the undisclosed diversion of FTX customers’ funds” to the exchange’s trading affiliate, Alameda Research.The S.E.C. now asserts that S.B.F. was more involved in Alameda’s operations than he let on. In a major revelation, the agency says he directed $8 billion worth of customer deposits from an Alameda-controlled bank into a separate account, labeled “fiat @ftx.com,” in part to avoid getting charged interest, a move that could suggest intent. From the complaint:“In 2022, FTX began trying to separate Alameda’s portion of the liability in the “fiat @ftx.com” account from the portion that was attributable to FTX (i.e., to separate out customer deposits sent to Alameda-controlled bank accounts from deposits sent to FTX-controlled bank accounts). Alameda’s portion — which amounted to more than $8 billion in FTX customer assets that had been deposited into Alameda-controlled bank accounts — was initially moved to a different account in the FTX database. However, because this change caused FTX’s internal systems to automatically charge Alameda interest on the more than $8 billion liability, Bankman-Fried directed that the Alameda liability be moved to an account that would not be charged interest.”The arrest took many by surprise. S.B.F. had been scheduled to testify on Tuesday before the House Financial Services Committee. The committee’s Democratic chair, Representative Maxine Waters of California, didn’t see this coming: “The public has been waiting eagerly to get these answers under oath before Congress, and the timing of this arrest denies the public this opportunity,” she said. (S.B.F. himself also said he did not expect to be arrested.)“I have never seen a case approaching this scope proceed this quickly,” Renato Mariotti, a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner and a former federal prosecutor, told DealBook. Given FTX’s scale — with more than 100 companies based around the world — and the lengthy list of creditors, lawyers and extradition experts said the government had moved faster than expected.S.B.F.’s media tour may have played a role: While most executives under criminal investigation clam up, the crypto entrepreneur has spoken out over and over again. That may have pushed prosecutors to act fast, according to Mariotti, to avoid S.B.F. “muddying the waters” of a potential case through repeated assertions that he was misguided and had made mistakes.But has S.B.F. also admitted wrongdoing? On the Unusual Whales podcast on Monday, he initially denied knowing that customer funds had moved from FTX to Alameda without permission, but then professed less certainty: “Like I, like, kind of vaguely knew, kind of, sort of maybe, um, on a qualitative level what was going on.”What could have been: News outlets including Forbes have obtained S.B.F.’s written testimony for Tuesday. It sets the ground for his claim to have simply made mistakes by professing he messed up with a profanity — which he stresses he is using “formally, under oath” — in the first sentence.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING The E.U. plans to tax imports based on carbon emissions. The bloc has reached an agreement meant both to protect European products made using fewer greenhouse-gas emissions and to effectively set an international price for carbon. It would also probably irritate trading partners.China begins a W.T.O. dispute over American chip export controls. Beijing accused the United States of trade protectionism by effectively blocking tech companies from selling advanced chips to China, hampering the Chinese tech industry. At the same time, Japan and the Netherlands are in talks to join the U.S. in tightening export controls on chipmaking machinery. More on Elon Musk’s Twitter TakeoverAn Established Pattern: Firing people. Talking of bankruptcy. Telling workers to be “hard core.” Twitter isn’t the first company that witnessed Elon Musk use those tactics.Rivals Emerge: Sensing an opportunity, new start-ups and other social platforms are racing to dethrone Twitter and capitalize on the chaos of its new ownership under Mr. Musk.The ‘Twitter Files’: Mr. Musk and Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist, set off an intense debate with a release of internal Twitter documents regarding a 2020 decision to restrict posts linking to a report in the New York Post about Hunter Biden.Hard Fork: The Times podcast looks at Mr. Musk’s two-day clash with Apple, which he had accused of trying to sabotage Twitter before saying the “misunderstanding” had been resolved.Congress scrambles to avert a government shutdown. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate majority leader, proposed a one-week spending bill to give negotiators more time for a broader government spending deal. Without that, the federal government will begin partially shutting down this weekend.The former C.E.O. of Wirecard moves to suspend his criminal fraud trial. A lawyer for Markus Braun told a Munich court that prosecutors had ignored crucial evidence and relied on an untrustworthy witness. The move is aimed at forestalling one of Germany’s biggest-ever fraud trials; the court is expected to rule on the motion in the coming weeks.U.S. researchers are set to unveil a breakthrough in nuclear fusion. Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California are expected to announce on Tuesday that they have successfully used lasers to achieve nuclear fusion whose output exceeded the input from the lasers. It’s a significant step toward making fusion a plausible energy source — someday.What FTX’s new C.E.O. will say about the exchange’s “utter failure” Even with Sam Bankman-Fried in custody, the House Financial Services Committee hearing into the collapse of FTX will go on as scheduled this morning, and its star witness will now be the exchange’s new C.E.O., John Ray III.Though Mr. Ray’s written testimony never calls FTX an outright fraud, the corporate restructuring expert will reiterate that he’s never seen “such an utter failure of corporate controls at every level of an organization.”Mr. Ray will detail eight “unacceptable management practices” that he believes led to the downfall of Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire. They include:Evidence that “customer assets from FTX.com were commingled with assets from the Alameda trading platform.”Alameda, FTX’s trading arm, being able to borrow funds held at the non-U.S. business unit, FTX.com, for its trading and investing “without any effective limits.”Shoddy recordkeeping and lax fiscal controls, including no audits and no documentation for “nearly 500 investments made with FTX Group funds and assets.”Evidence that loans and payments in excess of $1 billion were made to company insiders, and that the company went on a roughly $5 billion spending spree beginning in late 2021.Wall Street will be closely watching today’s inflation number U.S. futures have been edging higher on Tuesday and global stock markets are up ahead of a consequential Consumer Price Index report due out at 8:30 a.m. Eastern.An elevated C.P.I. would probably put the chill back into stock markets. If the inflation measure shows an annual rise above economists’ consensus estimate of a 7.3 percent, that could signal that the Fed’s interest-rate rises aren’t doing enough to slow the pace of inflation — and that more jumbo increases are needed. (Reminder: The Fed’s rate-decision day comes tomorrow.)A tepid C.P.I. could do the opposite. JPMorgan Chase traders have gamed out a few scenarios. They believe a reading of 6.9 percent would lead to a healthy rally in the S&P 500, with the benchmark index jumping 8 to 10 percent. They put the odds of such a low number at about one in 20.Central bankers and Wall Street pros have consistently forecast inflation wrong over the past year. In late 2021, many thought high inflation was a temporary phenomenon. It persisted. But then last month’s reading, which showed prices moderating, surprised many and triggered a rally in risky assets. “The inflation report is arguably the most uncertain of this week’s big macro event risks,” Alvin Tan, a foreign-exchange strategist at Royal Bank of Canada, said in an investor note on Tuesday.“The bet was that free money would last indefinitely, and there doesn’t seem to have been a risk-management game plan.” — Jon Burckett-St. Laurent, a senior portfolio manager at Exencial Wealth Advisors, on the financier Cathie Wood, who shot to prominence by investing heavily in money-losing tech companies. Wood’s flagship fund is trading at a five-year low as investors appear to have lost faith in her strategy.Twitter dissolves its trust and safety council Elon Musk has said that maintaining safety on Twitter is one of his highest priorities, and yet the social network just made a puzzling decision toward that end: On Monday night it disbanded an outside panel of experts that had advised it on matters of hate speech and safety.“Thank you,” began an email sent to members of the council — made up of civil rights groups, academics and others, formed in 2016 — an hour before they were to meet on Monday. The message said the group wasn’t “the best structure” to advise on product and policy any longer; it was signed “Twitter.”The dissolution of the board may have been inevitable, as three members had already quit last week over changes to Twitter’s content moderation. But it suggests Musk may ultimately centralize content policy in the interest of, as the email put it, “moving faster and more aggressively than ever before.”The move adds to critics’ worries that Twitter is becoming less safe. The advisers who quit last week cited the company relying more on automated content moderation: “It is clear from research evidence that, contrary to claims by Elon Musk, the safety and wellbeing of Twitter’s users are on the decline,” they wrote in their resignation statement.Meanwhile, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, and his family reportedly went into hiding after Mr. Musk misrepresented his academic thesis about gay social networks online to falsely imply that it supported sexualizing children. (Professors who reviewed Mr. Roth’s thesis also received online abuse.)In other Elon Musk news:The Twitter account that shows the movements of Mr. Musk’s private jet has been “shadowbanned,” according to its owner.The $5.7 billion worth of Tesla shares that Mr. Musk donated to charity last year went to his personal charitable foundation.Mr. Musk has lost his crown as the world’s richest person, at least by one measure, to Bernard Arnault of LVMH.THE SPEED READ DealsThe private equity firm Thoma Bravo agreed to buy Coupa Software, which makes software to manage corporate expenses, for $8 billion, as it seeks to capitalize on declining valuations of tech companies. (FT)Speaking of which, Checkout.com, one of Europe’s biggest privately held tech companies, recently slashed its internal valuation by 72 percent, to $11 billion. (FT)Goldman Sachs reportedly plans to cut hundreds of retail banking jobs. (Bloomberg)Investors’ rush to withdraw from a big Blackstone real-estate fund may have broader fallout. (WSJ)PolicyThe Supreme Court rejected a bid by British American Tobacco to halt California’s ban on flavored tobacco products. (Bloomberg)Chinese authorities arrested 63 people whom they accused of laundering $1.7 billion with the crypto token Tether. (Insider)Hong Kong has lifted more of its bar and restaurant Covid restrictions, as China continues easing pandemic rules. (FT)Best of the restThe Wall Street Journal named Emma Tucker, the editor of London’s Sunday Times, to lead its newsroom, the first woman to hold that role. (NYT)“How Sexism Influenced Corporate Governance” (NYT)Amazon has delayed hiring college graduates to help cut costs. (FT)The back story on Taylor Swift choosing Searchlight, the art-house movie studio, over major streaming services for her debut as a feature-film director. (Puck)The hedge-fund mogul Ray Dalio and the director James Cameron are teaming up to make submarines for the ultrawealthy. (FT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      Oil Prices Rise as the West Imposes a Cap on Russian Crude

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      Energy traders pushed crude prices higher on Monday following Europe’s embargo of seaborne Russian crude and a price cap by Group of 7 nations went into effect.Will Russia find buyers for its crude?Sergei Karpukhin/ReutersOil prices climb despite efforts to cap Russian exports Crude oil prices rose this morning after a whirlwind of events that could drastically alter the supply and pricing of energy this winter.An E.U. embargo on Russia’s seaborne oil imports went into effect on Monday, following a decision on Sunday by OPEC producers and Russia to keep production quotas unchanged. Those developments, together with an agreement on Friday by Group of 7 nations to impose a $60 price cap on Russian crude and the emergence of more signs that China is easing its Covid restrictions, set off a modest buying spree among energy traders.By 6 a.m. Eastern, Brent crude, the global benchmark, climbed 2.7 percent, topping $87 per barrel, and West Texas Intermediate was above $82 a barrel.Crude prices have whipsawed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, rocketing above $100 per barrel in the spring, only to fall over the summer on fears of a global recession. A slowdown in China in particular had capped demand, but prices have remained volatile.Analysts have been scrutinizing fallout from the oil price cap, a move designed to punish Russia for the war in Ukraine — but also meant to avoid significant distortions in the energy markets that would force consumers and businesses to pay even higher prices for fuel.Unsurprisingly, Moscow said this weekend that it wouldn’t accept the Western price cap, and that it would cut sales to countries that participate in the arrangement. How much of an effect that will have is unclear: Even before Monday, European countries have systematically reduced their Russian crude purchases since the start of the war in Ukraine — only for China to step in and buy more oil, often at a discount. But in recent weeks, China has paused some purchases as it waited for details of the price cap to be announced.Helima Croft, the head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, warned in an investor note this weekend that prices could be even more volatile in the weeks ahead as traders watch for signs that Russia could fully cut off oil exports to former trading partners in retaliation for the price cap.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Chinese cities ease zero-Covid restrictions. Shenzhen and Shanghai were the latest big cities to scrap requirements like testing before traveling on public transport, following widespread protests against Beijing’s tough pandemic rules. Shares in Hong Kong and Shanghai jumped amid investor hopes of a broader easing of Chinese Covid restrictions, though analysts warned such a move would take time.Lachlan Murdoch is set to testify in a Fox News lawsuit on Monday. The C.E.O. of Fox will be deposed as part of a lawsuit against the network by Dominion Voting Systems. He is the highest-ranking executive to be ensnared in the lawsuit, in which Dominion argues it was defamed by Fox News anchors repeatedly amplifying false claims about the company’s voting machines in the 2020 election.Wall Street banks weigh cutting bonuses. Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase may cut bonus pools for investment bankers by as much as 30 percent, Bloomberg reports, amid a steep drop in M.& A. activity. That follows plans by Goldman Sachs to cut bonuses for its traders, even though their division posted strong results.Credit Suisse’s investment bank spinoff reportedly draws big new backers. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and a merchant bank run by the former Barclays C.E.O. Bob Diamond may invest in CS First Boston, which is set to be spun off from Credit Suisse, The Wall Street Journal reports. The spinoff is a key part of the Swiss bank’s planned revamp.Delta reaches a nearly $8 billion pay-raise deal with pilots. The agreement in principle would raise pilots’ pay by 31 percent over four years, as well as include a one-time payout. If finalized, the agreement will set a baseline for other airlines in their negotiations with pilots.Crypto’s false calm If this is the crypto apocalypse, investors see a buying opportunity. The price of Bitcoin is up nearly 7 percent, or almost $1,200, in the past week, to just under $17,400.But that market calm does not mean the crypto contagion is contained. The fallout from the collapse last month of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, FTX, has spread to other firms, setting off a wave of layoffs, lawsuits and investigations. Shareholders of Silvergate, the U.S. bank that processed payments and money transfers for FTX, sued the bank for negligence, calling the exchange a Ponzi scheme.Meanwhile, customers of Gemini, the crypto exchange owned by the Winklevoss twins, are owed as much as $900 million from Genesis, the crypto lender that has faced severe financial distress since FTX’s collapse, according to The Financial Times. And ByBit, a major crypto exchange, announced this weekend that it would cut 30 percent of its staff, the latest firm to cut its head count as digital asset prices sink.Here’s what else is happening in crypto:Mr. Bankman-Fried said on Sunday that he would be willing to testify before the House Financial Services Committee. The catch: S.B.F., as he is known, probably won’t be ready to speak with lawmakers in time for Dec. 13 hearings into the implosion of FTX.Mr. Bankman-Fried’s media tour shows no signs of slowing down. He told The Financial Times that he regretted giving Alameda Research, the trading affiliate of FTX, favorable borrowing limits.S.B.F.’s father, the Stanford law professor Joseph Bankman, has canceled a class he was set to teach next year. Bankman did work for FTX’s philanthropic efforts and is helping with his son’s legal defense.FTX’s bankruptcy has international regulators, including those in Cyprus, Turkey and the Bahamas, squabbling over the company’s assets, potentially complicating which customers get repaid and how much.Andrew Vara, the U.S. bankruptcy trustee for FTX’s case, called on the Delaware court to appoint an independent examiner into the exchange’s sudden collapse, saying there is substantial evidence to suggest that misconduct and fraud were involved.Even though calls for investigations are intensifying, that doesn’t mean Bankman-Fried’s arrest is imminent.On the light side: S.B.F., an eager player of the League of Legends video game, has been getting shade from the likes of Elon Musk and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for being a mediocre player.Have normal times returned to Twitter? Elon Musk is still running Twitter, so naturally, there is still plenty of drama around the social network — notably in the billionaire owner’s decision to actively promote the release of internal documents about executives’ 2020 decision to restrict tweets linking to a news report about Hunter Biden.Despite that, it appears that some major advertisers are slowly returning to Twitter’s platform, after many hit pause following Musk’s promise to revamp how the site moderates user content.Amazon plans to resume buying ads on Twitter, to the tune of $100 million a year, according to Zoë Schiffer of Platformer. Although the e-commerce giant, unlike others, had not quit its ad spending altogether since Musk’s takeover, it had paused some of its campaigns.Meanwhile, Mr. Musk said in a live audio event on Twitter over the weekend that Apple had “fully resumed” ad spending on the social network. The iPhone maker has long been one of the biggest ad purchasers on Twitter. Last week, Mr. Musk said that he had resolved a feud with Apple, chalking up the disagreements to a misunderstanding.That’s a rare bit of welcome news for Twitter’s business. The Times reported last week that the company had rapidly cut revenue projections, as U.S. ad sales continued to come in well below internal expectations. Advertisers have been alarmed by Mr. Musk’s pledges to lessen restrictions on user content, as well as a botched rollout of revamped verification badges that briefly let paying subscribers impersonate brands. Automakers like G.M. have also been concerned that Twitter could share their ad data with the Musk-owned Tesla, a key rival.Mr. Musk introduced a new bit of drama into Twitter over the weekend, when he touted the release of the so-called Twitter Files. The independent journalist Matt Taibbi — who famously called Goldman Sachs a “vampire squid” — published internal documents showing executives’ deliberations about how to handle dissemination of a New York Post story based on files from a laptop stolen from Hunter Biden.The move rankled some former Twitter executives, including the company’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, who said publicizing unredacted documents was “fundamentally unacceptable.” (Musk later conceded, “I think we should have excluded some email addresses.”)“It’s like a cake that was dropped on the table and it looks more or less fine, but inside it’s all blown up.” — Vladislav Inozemtsev, the Washington-based director of the Center for Post-Industrial Studies, a Russian research group, on the state of the Russian economy following sanctions and an exodus of Western firms.The week ahead Politics, inflation data and a trickle of earnings reports will be in focus this week. Here’s what to look for:Tomorrow: A key Senate seat is up for grabs in the Georgia runoff election. Early-voting tallies have smashed state records.Wednesday: New data on the health of the world’s two largest economies will be published, with U.S. consumer credit and China trade data scheduled for release.Thursday: Costco and Broadcom release quarterly results.Friday: The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index and Producer Price Index data are set to come out. China will also release a fresh batch of inflation data.THE SPEED READ DealsOne of the Democratic commissioners at the F.T.C. reportedly favors a less-confrontational approach to Microsoft’s $69 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard, potentially undercutting efforts to block the deal. (New York Post)The private equity firm CVC is said to be weighing options, including a sale, of the computer accessories maker Razer, less than a year after buying the business. (Bloomberg)Assa Abloy will sell its Emtek and Yale security brands to Fortune Brands Home & Security for $800 million. (Reuters)PolicyMeta faces a trio of E.U. privacy fines that could exceed $2 billion, a record. (Politico)The European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, said that Europe needed to overhaul its public investment rules so its firms could better compete against American counterparts who receive Inflation Reduction Act funding. (FT)New Zealand plans to force Meta’s Facebook and Google to pay news publishers for the content hosted on their platforms, taking a cue from Australia and Canada. (WSJ)Best of the restIt’s not just Big Tech: Big media companies are cutting jobs, too. (WSJ)“Goblin mode,” an Elon Musk favorite, was named Oxford Languages’ 2022 word of the year. (NYT)Activision Blizzard game testers unanimously voted to form a union. (Reuters)“The 4-day week: does it actually work?” (FT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More