Global oil supplies are slowly catching up with flagging demand for crude, leaving the oil market close to balanced, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries said, suggesting the cartel sees little need in the short term to increase its output further.

The Vienna-based producers’ group cut its forecasts for global oil demand this year by 260,000 barrels to 100.03 million barrels a day, citing the impact of slowing global economies. It also cut its demand forecasts for 2023 by the same amount to 102.72 million barrels a day.

The U.S. sanctioning of a prominent cryptocurrency platform this week exposed technical gaps in the government’s ability to prevent criminals, national adversaries and extremist groups from using the services to launder money and finance their operations, analysts said.

Among the central challenges: Cryptocurrency platforms are increasingly run by computer code distributed across

In romance, rebound relationships are a bad idea. In the stock market, though, they can be quite rewarding.

Two years ago, Singapore opened its doors to cryptocurrency firms. Now, after the implosions of multiple digital currencies and players rooted in the city-state, regulators are trying to distance themselves from the blowups while they grapple with how to rein in the industry.

Crypto brokers, lenders, exchanges and blockchain companies flocked to the Southeast Asian financial hub after it enacted a regulatory framework for payment services in early 2020. Close to 200 firms applied for licenses to provide digital-payment-token services, according to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the country’s central bank and top financial regulator.

The entertainment giant’s fiscal third-quarter results late Wednesday were largely a hit. Revenue and operating income surpassed Wall Street’s expectations, thanks mostly to strength in its domestic theme parks, where operating profits are now exceeding prepandemic levels. The company’s cable TV and broadcast business held steady, and it managed to add 14.4 million net new subscribers to its Disney+ streaming service—well over the 10 million additions expected by analysts and the best growth the service has seen in six quarters. Disney’s share price jumped nearly 7% following the results.

A federal jury in Chicago convicted two former traders of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s precious metals desk who had been charged with manipulating gold prices, finding they used misleading orders to rig prices.

The convictions are the capstone of a seven-year Justice Department campaign to punish a style of deceptive trading in futures markets known as spoofing. The rapid-fire strategy was prevalent at some Wall Street banks before Congress outlawed spoofing in 2010, and persisted even after its prohibition, according to prosecutors. JPMorgan paid $920 million in 2020 to settle regulatory and criminal charges against the bank over the traders’ conduct.

Data on inflation and economic activity are likely to guide whether central bank officials lift their benchmark federal-funds rate by half a percentage point or three-quarters of a point at their Sept. 20-21 policy meeting. They have said they want to see evidence that price pressures and economic growth are cooling before they moderate their pace of rate increases.

The average price of a gallon of unleaded gasoline in the U.S. fell to $4 a gallon Wednesday, a 20% drop from June’s peak, as demand for oil softens around the globe.

It is the first time since March that the average price of gasoline has been at $4 a gallon, giving drivers some reprieve as the rate of inflation remains

Crypto exchange CoinFLEX has filed for restructuring in a Seychelles court as it seeks to recover $84 million in losses from a large individual customer. 

CoinFLEX informed customers of the restructuring plans Tuesday via email, a spokeswoman for the company confirmed. Bloomberg News earlier reported the plans. 

Social Security checks get an inflation adjustment every year based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers. In determining the cost of living adjustment, or COLA, the Social Security Administration compares the average figures for July, August and September to the index’s average level over the same period a year earlier.

After a more than $1 trillion selloff, many investors think China’s three largest tech stocks have bottomed out. But skeptics say the biggest problems facing the sector still haven’t been resolved.

Alibaba Group Holding Tencent Holdings and Meituan have collectively lost more than $1.2 trillion in value since February last year, when the combined market capitalization of the trio peaked. That was part of a wider rout in Chinese tech stocks. China’s ultra-strict “zero Covid” policy, a domestic economic slowdown and a crackdown on the sector by the Chinese government have all pushed down shares.

Investors approved a two-year payment delay on roughly $20 billion of Ukraine’s foreign-currency debt, heeding calls from Washington and other allied governments to grant the embattled nation a financial reprieve as it burns through cash.

Ukraine asked bondholders last month to push back payments of interest and principal on a clutch of dollar- and euro-denominated government bonds, with a combined face value of nearly $20 billion, by two years. The government’s request came as little surprise to creditors, who had expected that Kyiv would need to restructure its debts as the war dragged on.

The cryptocurrency exchange’s stock jumped last week on the news of a partnership with BlackRock to connect to its Aladdin investment-management platform for institutions, starting with Bitcoin. But institutional volumes aren’t a cure-all for what ails the exchange right now. Coinbase has a rising share of volume coming from institutional versus retail—79% in the second quarter, versus 69% a year prior, the company reported on Tuesday. Yet retail volume still fetched a far higher fee rate in the second quarter, around 1.3% versus 0.02%.

U.S. government bond yields dropped Wednesday after new data raised investors’ hopes that the pandemic era’s stubbornly high inflation might finally be easing.

Yields, which fall when bond prices rise, slid after the Labor Department said that overall consumer prices were roughly

WASHINGTON—The collapse in cryptocurrency prices this year has left U.S. regulators scrambling to understand the risks that digital-asset markets could pose to the broader economy.

They may soon enlist hedge funds in the effort.