Good morning. President Trump says he struck a diesel-supply deal with Russia. The deal is getting strong pushback in Washington from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who question its legality.

Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said a 2022 law bans Russian energy imports until Russia ends its aggression against Ukraine and stops threatening U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

• Direct Conflict: “President Trump’s decision to allow Russian diesel imports to the U.S. runs directly counter to that law,” the bipartisan group wrote. “The administration must immediately reverse course.”

• Price impact: The deal likely won’t do much to ease fuel prices ahead of next month’s midterm elections. On Monday, diesel futures in New York were little changed from Friday’s close and had erased all but a penny of the after-hours decline sparked by Trump’s social-media post announcing the deal.

• The math: Trump said Friday that Russia agreed to lift the export ban it imposed this summer and ship hundreds of thousands of tons of diesel into global markets this month and next, with larger amounts to follow. The amounts Trump outlined work out to a little more than 100,000 barrels a day this month and roughly 125,000 barrels a day in November. That compares with about 800,000 barrels a day that Russia shipped last year.

• Drop in the bucket: Analysts and energy traders say the volumes outlined by Trump are a drop in the bucket compared with the global supply deficit and may reflect Russia’s greatly diminished refining capacity. Analysts say that ultimately Russia and Ukraine will need to reach a ceasefire—or normal traffic will need to resume through the Strait of Hormuz—for prices to ease significantly.

U.K. fraud fighters float paying whistleblowers.

The U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office said it could begin to pay whistleblowers who come forward with evidence of economic crimes, Risk Journal’s Richard Vanderford reports. (free link)

Under the U.K. government’s proposal, the SFO would award whistleblowers who provide information that is “both significant and original” and that leads to a successful enforcement action against a company, including a deferred prosecution agreement. Tipsters would get paid after an enforcement target has exhausted its appeals, based on a proportion of the fine.

Retirement savers sue Dodgers owner Mark Walter saying his insurers misled them.

Lawsuits are piling up against Dodgers owner Mark Walter brought by senior citizens who bought annuities from his insurance companies.

A suit filed Monday is at least the third to allege Walter and his insurers sold annuities based on misrepresentations and false promises. The suits, brought by class-action lawyers seeking to represent a larger group of policyholders, come after two of Walter’s insurers disclosed in June that they were under federal investigation for failing to report how much of their portfolio was deployed as loans to other companies connected to Walter’s sports-and-financial empire.

• Risk Journal reports: The European Union announced sanctions against 826 entities on Monday, saying many of them are part of Russia’s military-industrial complex and supply high-tech components such as semiconductors and communications equipment to the military. (free link)

• Melrose Industries said its GKN Aerospace unit reached a $125 million settlement with authorities in California relating to a chemicals case, and that it expects to restart operations at the site this quarter.

• Visa received approval to start preparing to establish a domestic bank card clearing institution in China.

The amount supermarket chain Albertsons wants its top rival Kroger to pay after their grocery megadeal imploded two years ago.

Delta delays plans for nonstop service to Saudi Arabia.

Delta is pushing back plans to launch nonstop service between Atlanta and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, after several fatal strikes at the city’s airport.

The carrier said Monday it now expects to debut the flight in March, delaying previous plans for an Oct. 23 rollout. The move comes after attacks over the weekend on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport. The strikes, carried out by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militant group, killed at least a dozen people and injured hundreds more.

Xi’s superpower ambitions fuel a dangerous debt spiral in China.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping, intent on pouring trillions into making China a technological and military superpower, is presiding over a dangerous spiral of debt that is strangling the economy at home and damaging trade partners around the world.

Rising debt loads in many countries have spooked investors of late. But few nations have seen a surge more dramatic than China.

Last year, China’s credit to the nonfinancial sector—a broad measure of corporate, government and household borrowings—topped 300% of gross domestic product, 60 percentage points higher than at the end of 2019 and now far bigger than in the U.S. It has jumped by more than $43 trillion since Xi took office in late 2012, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

• Why China Doesn’t Want to Join the Ranks of the World’s Developed Countries

• China’s Weakening Economy Is Creating a Lost Generation

• President Trump touts his ability to attract billions of dollars in investment to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. But getting the projects up and running will mean clearing many of the same hurdles that drove heavy industry out of the U.S.

• NATO’s top military commander sought to steady an anxious Europe on Monday, outlining the alliance’s new military plan to thwart a potential Russian assault along its eastern flank with a mix of firepower, autonomous systems and sensors that borrows from the lessons of Ukraine.

• Iran is fortifying its defenses, rallying loyalists and threatening a wider, harsher response against the U.S. and its Gulf allies as it prepares for potential American attacks after the midterms and seeks to deter them.

• The logistics arm of United Arab Emirates’s oil-and-gas giant Adnoc is in talks to acquire a big stake in HEA Energy, a deal that would value the Middle Eastern-based energy marine services company at up to $3 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Adnoc is seeking to boost oil and gas production after the U.A.E. broke away earlier this year from OPEC, the price-setting oil cartel.

• A bitcoin-mining business that appeared left for dead after the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire is being resuscitated to serve the artificial-intelligence build-out.

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