Good morning. Microsoft and Google can translate, say, Spanish to English, but who can translate finance speak?

Up-and-coming compliance software firms are leaning into artificial intelligence to help crack esoteric trader argot, as Wall Street and London watchdogs increasingly dive into traders’ jargon-loaded and even coded messages to help fight financial crime.

Financial conspiracies are often built on the clandestine communications between financial professionals in which they agree to, for example, rig an interest-rate benchmark or increase the price at which a currency is trading.

Even an educated lay person would need an insider to explain the lingo used between traders. But compliance software companies are rushing to provide firms with AI tools that enable their systems to outsmart crooked traders.

Note to readers: The Morning Risk Report won’t be published Monday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We’ll be back Tuesday.

American Express to pay $230 million in fines for aggressive sales practices.

American Express has agreed to pay approximately $230 million in penalties over deceptive practices tied to how it sold credit cards and wire services to small-business customers.

The settlements include a $108.7 million civil penalty from the Justice Department and a nonprosecution agreement with the Eastern District of New York over a criminal investigation into some of the practices. The company has also reached an agreement in principle with its regulators at the Federal Reserve that it expects will be finalized in the coming weeks.

Trump allies eye last-ditch effort to save TikTok.

TikTok gained new hope for survival in America, with its CEO slated to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration and the incoming president’s advisers working on options to delay a ban of the popular video app.

TikTok Chief Executive Shou Chew is expected to sit among the president-elect’s high-profile guests as Trump delivers his inaugural address on Monday, according to people familiar with the matter. That will put him in the company of influential U.S. tech leaders who are planning to attend, including billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk, Amazon.com Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—as well as Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of TikTok rival Meta Platforms.

• CNN has spent nearly two weeks in court defending itself against defamation allegations. The jury began deliberations Thursday afternoon in a case that could leave CNN on the hook for millions of dollars in damages and send ripples through the industry.
   
• General Motors reached an agreement to settle allegations that the automaker shared drivers’ locations and behavior data without their consent, the Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday.
   
• The U.S. imposed sanctions on Sudan’s de facto president, Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, as punishment for the brutal military campaign he has led in the country’s devastating civil war.

China has a $1 trillion head start in any tariff fight.

Donald Trump kicked off a new era of Western economic rivalry with Beijing when he took office in 2017. As he prepares for his second term, China’s dominance of global manufacturing is greater than ever. 

China just posted a trade surplus with the rest of the world of almost $1 trillion for 2024, according to official data released this week. That giant gap between exports and imports—roughly equal to the annual output of Poland—is now three times what it was in 2018. For Washington and its allies, this ascendancy shows that efforts to reduce their dependence on China are coming up short. That suggests it will remain hard for Trump to rebalance U.S.-China trade relations, even if he pushes tariffs higher.

• Barrage of Stimulus Powers Robust Chinese Growth—and Some Skepticism

Global economy to record steady but weak growth, warns World Bank.

Global economic growth is set to steady this year and next, but remain weak and below rates that would enable poor countries to narrow the income gap with rich ones as quickly as they did earlier in the century, the World Bank said Thursday.

In its twice-yearly report on the outlook for the global economy, the World Bank said output is likely to rise by 2.7% in 2025 and 2026, the same rate of growth recorded last year. However, that rate of expansion is significantly lower than the average before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the World Bank’s economists said the longer-term outlook is the weakest since the turn of the century.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said negotiators have reached an agreement on a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip that would free Israeli hostages, ending two days of debate that had underscored the pact’s fragility.
   
• The eurozone’s trade surplus widened in November as exports outpaced imports, with a small uptick in exports to the U.S. suggesting importers there may be purchasing European goods ahead of proposed tariffs.
   
• India inched closer to acknowledging a role in a murder-for-hire plot aimed at an American citizen.
   
• The U.K. economy returned to growth in November.
   
• Insurance company State Farm has abandoned its plan to run a commercial in the coming Super Bowl. Fires in California are putting a spotlight on the insurance industry and how some of its leading companies have been pulling back from the state.

• Venture capital, known for making longshot bets on groundbreaking tech, is now buying up stakes in a more button-down sector of the economy: accounting.
   
• Businesses are starting to link their artificial intelligence initiatives with paring back hiring plans, or so-called cost avoidance, in an effort to justify investing in the technology.
   
• New York and California forced companies to remove so-called forever chemicals from apparel. It hasn’t been smooth.
   
• For overseas debtors looking to file for bankruptcy in the U.S., “basically a dollar is enough” to show a business presence.

She will join the Waterloo, Ontario-based firm as chief ethics and compliance officer on Feb. 3.

Crypto exchange Kraken’s chief legal officer taking on new role.

Marco Santori said he is stepping down as Kraken’s chief legal officer, a role he has held for the past five years. In a message posted Wednesday on X, Santori said he would stay on as a senior advisor at the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange.

Santori said he helped grow the legal team at Kraken from four to almost 70 people. He said he would help train a successor and help build a global advisory council for Kraken in his new role.