Briefcase

Crypto exchange agrees to $50m fine

Coinbase, a publicly traded cryptocurrency trading exchange based in the United States, agreed to pay a $50 million fine after financial regulators found that it let customers open accounts without conducting sufficient background checks, in violation of anti-money-laundering laws.

The settlement with the New York State Department of Financial Services, announced Wednesday, will also require Coinbase to invest $50 million to bolster its compliance program, which is supposed to prevent drug traffickers, sellers of child pornography and other potential lawbreakers from opening accounts with the exchange.

The compliance problems at Coinbase were first detected during a routine examination in 2020 after the exchange secured a license to operate in New York in 2017, regulators said. They found problems with the exchange’s anti-money-laundering controls going as far back as 2018.

Coinbase initially agreed to hire an independent consultant to help overhaul its day-to-day operations so that they met requirements set by anti-money-laundering laws to know the identities of customers and monitor their behavior for suspicious activity.

But that did not fix the company’s problems and regulators opened a formal investigation in 2021. The exchange had fallen behind on two key operations: digging deeper into the backgrounds of customers whose identities seemed murky at first glance and following up on the suspicious-activity alerts that its internal monitoring system generated.

EU fines Meta over use of users’ data

Meta Platforms was hit with $414 million in fines by the European Union’s main privacy watchdog over the way users’ data is used for personalized ads on its Facebook and Instagram units, and given an ultimatum to bring its services in line with E.U. law.

Meta has three months to ensure the processing of such information complies with E.U. rules, the Irish Data Protection Commission said in a statement on Wednesday. The regulator slapped Facebook with a $223 million fine, and Instagram a further $191 million after the watchdog concluded that Meta’s terms of service requiring users to accept personalized ads when signing up to the social media services violated E.U. rules.

The Irish watchdog found that Meta “is not entitled to rely on the ‘contract’ legal basis in connection with the delivery of behavioral advertising” on Facebook and Instagram, and that its processing of customer data breaches the E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.

U.S. job market still tight, survey shows

U.S. job openings remained elevated in November, highlighting how a resilient labor market is likely to keep the Federal Reserve tilted toward more restrictive policy in the months ahead.

The number of available positions ticked down to 10.46 million from 10.51 million a month earlier, the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, showed Wednesday. The figure was higher than all estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists.

The figures point to a still-tight jobs market where employers’ demand for workers far outstrips supply. Hiring, while moderating, remains solid and layoffs low. The persistent imbalance continues to put upward pressure on wages and has been highlighted by Fed Chair Jerome Powell as key to the path of inflation.

The elevated number of openings paired with consistently robust payroll advances is likely to reinforce expectations that the Fed will keep rates restrictive for quite some time to quell inflation and ensure price growth is on a sustained downward trend.

From wire reports