Pain point.

Asian stock markets looked poised for a cautious open as Federal Reserve officials warned of more pain to come as they raise interest rates to fight inflation. Equity futures indicated tepid moves as trading starts in Australia and Japan after the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 declined for the second straight session. Contracts for Hong Kong were higher after a gauge of US-listed Chinese shares notched its fifth gain in six days as investors react to more market-friendly policy signals from Beijing.

Photo illustration: Cam Pollack/The Wall Street Journal, iStock; Nasdaq; Amazon; Carvana; Bitcoin

US plans to unveil more data on Treasuries trading to help bond market

US regulators are taking a fresh step toward enhancing the level of public reporting of Treasuries trading data, a move aimed at helping boost the resiliency of the world’s biggest bond market. “We are proposing to provide transaction-level transparency to the public, in a gradual and in a calibrated way,” the Treasury Department’s top domestic finance official, Nellie Liang, said in remarks at an annual conference on the Treasuries market in New York Wednesday. “We will walk, not run,” she said, without specifying when the new trading data will start getting released. (Bloomberg Markets |Nov 16)

Reducing inflation without a recession might not be feasible, Fed official says

Inflation is at risk of growing entrenched in the economy due to an overheated job market, and that will make it increasingly difficult for the Federal Reserve to bring inflation down without a recession, a central bank official said in an interview. Some of George’s colleagues have recently said that they still see a way for the Fed to bring inflation down without a serious downturn, but George was more circumspect in an interview Tuesday. (The Wall Street Journal | Nov 16)

Investors question whether big tech's rebound can last

Technology stocks last week staged their biggest comeback since the global financial crisis. Some investors still aren’t sold on the sector. The Nasdaq Composite closed out the week with its biggest two-day gain since 2008, after softer-than-expected inflation data revived investors’ hopes that the Federal Reserve would slow down its pace of interest-rate increases. Many investors are hoping that if and when the Fed begins to pull back on its rate increases the group will lead the market’s charge once again. (The Wall Street Journal | Nov 13)

The cracks in the US Treasury bond market

Buying and selling in the world’s biggest bond market is supposed to be easy. However, for most of this year, says Gregory Whiteley, a bond portfolio manager at DoubleLine Capital, it has been anything but straightforward. Whiteley says a trader used to be able to get hold of $400mn of US Treasury bonds – not an outsize quantity in this $24tn market – as a routine matter. But now that typically involves breaking up the order into smaller chunks; perhaps doing $100mn of the trade electronically, he explains, and then picking up the phone to see if they can prise the rest of the debt from the hands of Wall Street’s trading desks over the course of a day. (Financial Times | Nov 15)

Investors pump record sums into leveraged ETFs

Investors have poured record sums into high-risk leveraged funds this year in spite of the collapse in financial markets. The funds, designed to magnify any market gains, also deepen any losses if asset prices fall, meaning many investors are likely to have been left badly out of pocket as stock markets have tumbled this year. Globally, investors pumped a net $28.3bn into leveraged and inverse exchange traded funds in the first nine months of the year, according to data from Morningstar Direct, equivalent to 5.4 percent of all purchases of ETFs. (The Financial Times | Nov 13)

Pro-Russia Killnet hacker group claims to have penetrated the FBI’s website

This week, pro-Russian hackers claimed responsibility for what they said was an attack on a section of the FBI's website, the newest addition to a recent string of purported attacks on U.S. government websites from Russian-aligned hackers. The hacking group Killnet shared a post on its Telegram page on Monday flagging an "attack" on the law enforcement resources site for the FBI. The message included a photo of what looked to be a failed attempt to enter the FBI site. The post was originally shared by another account called "RADIS," the bio for which mentions the "Killnet team" and the protection of Russia's cyberspace.

— Newsweek

Hot market for cyber insurance begins to stabilize

The market for cyber insurance has begun to stabilize after a surge in ransomware attacks in recent years propelled a steep rise in premiums, observers say. Cyber insurance can pay ransoms to hackers who lock company technology systems, or it can help offset the cost of responding to data breaches. Now, the premium increases of recent years seem to be slowing, if not halting entirely, as insurers get better at evaluating risks, new market entrants begin offering coverage, and supply and demand assert themselves.

— The Wall Street Journal

Wray tells lawmakers that FBI conducts cyber offensive operations

FBI Director Christopher Wray told Senate lawmakers on Thursday that his agency has been conducting offensive cyber operations against state and non-state cyber actors. Wray said offensive operations are one of many tactics the agency employs to counter various cyber threats.

— The Hill

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Best tech gifts 2022: WSJ guide to gadgets this holiday shopping season

This year, the best gear is stuff you and your loved ones will put to good use, such as a Wi-Fi-boosting Alexa speaker, a noise-canceling earbud upgrade and an adjustable light to illuminate webcam appearances. There are plenty of fun products, including a projector that plugs into a lightbulb socket, and a sensible splurge or two. A $1,100 vacuuming and mopping robot, anyone?

— The Wall Street Journal

Russian oligarchs running out of hiding places for jets, yachts

The man spearheading the US hunt for the yachts, private jets and cash stashes of sanctioned Russians warned they may struggle to hide their riches in even the most far-flung parts of the globe. The Justice Department’s “KleptoCapture” taskforce has been at the forefront of holding sanctioned Russians to account since President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The team, which has so far seized “multiple hundreds of millions of dollars” worth of assets, will continue to make “arrests around the world, in pockets of the world where people might otherwise think that they are safe from arrest,” Andrew Adams, the prosecutor leading the initiative.

— Bloomberg Politics

Five tiny gadgets with super-powers

The dream of Douglas Adams’s mythical Babel Fish (the universal translator featured in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) is still a way off, but we're edging forward, bit by bit. With the marker pen-sized Scan Reader Pen 3 PRO, you choose your spoken and translated language from a list of 112 – from Arabic to Vietnamese – say a few words, and in a couple of seconds you’ll hear the translation spoken and see it displayed on the built-in screen.

— Financial Times