📝 Good afternoon and welcome to Notes on the News. Here’s what you should know today, Jan. 26: The Fed has signaled it'll raise interest rates in March, the biggest banks are making more loans to car buyers and Mattel will reunite with the Disney princesses.

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1. The Federal Reserve held short-term interest rates steady today, but signaled plans to raise them in mid-March. That intention is the strongest sign yet that the Fed is moving toward removing stimulus to bring down inflation. Inflation, which erodes most people's purchasing power, hit 7% in December, its fastest pace in close to 40 years.

2. Big banks are looking to—beep, beep!—car lots to find borrowers. Their auto-loan balances grew 12% during 2021, according to Moody’s Investors Service. Car buyers are spending—and borrowing—more money as supply-chain issues have limited production of new cars and sent used-vehicle prices sky high.

3. Mattel regained the license to produce toys based on the Disney princesses and the movie “Frozen.” That means make room for the likes of Elsa, Ariel and Mulan in the Barbie Dreamhouse. The toymaker lost the rights to rival Hasbro in 2016. Mattel will start selling new Disney merch next year. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

4. Some at-home Covid-19 test kits can pose accessibility issues to people with vision or manual-dexterity problems. Advocates for people with disabilities say using color contrast to convey information poses challenges for the colorblind and the lack of online audio or video instructions online make it impossible for blind or visually-impaired people.

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$5.5 billion — Tesla’s record annual profit. The electric-vehicle maker posted that amount on $53.8 billion of sales last year even as the global computer-chip shortage slowed production industrywide.

$630 billion — The all-time high amount of Russia’s international reserves, including gold holdings and foreign currency. The tally, calculated in December, is one of the world’s biggest. Yesterday, the U.S. said it could impose economic sanctions, if Russia invades Ukraine.

48 — The minimum number of hours before the filming of a Hollywood nude scene and the signing of a legal document outlining what the actor will do, the number of cameras involved and other information, according to intimacy coordinator Chelsea Pace. Full-frontal male nudity is the hot thing in movies now.

For the first time, outsiders are joining the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation board of trustees.

The four new members come aboard this week. Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates co-founded the charity, which has an endowment of more than $50 billion; they remained co-chairs after they got divorced last year. The previous other trustees were Bill Gates Sr., who died two years ago, and Warren Buffett, who resigned in June. The foundation was established 21 years ago.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring.

The Clinton appointee likely will remain in the job until the end of the current Supreme Court term, but his decision gives President Biden a chance to fill the seat with a liberal jurist before Republicans potentially win the White House or the Senate. Breyer, 83 years old, is the oldest member of the court. Democrats were nervous about when he’d leave, well aware that the death at age 87 of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had allowed former President Donald Trump to appoint a conservative jurist, Amy Coney Barrett, as her replacement.

It’s almost the one-year anniversary since the GameStop Reddit saga.

The Wall Street Journal is holding a live Q&A session at 1 p.m. ET Thursday to demystify what happened last January when a bunch of WallStreetBets users got together to buy the video-game retailer’s stock and send its price soaring, shocking more traditional Wall Street investors. Reporters Gunjan Banerji, Caitlin McCabe and Juliet Chung will be on hand to answer your questions at the event, hosted by Katherine Finnerty.

Corrections & Amplifications: The Super Bowl will air on NBC on Feb. 13. Notes on the News on Jan. 25 said the game will air on CBS.

Today's newsletter was curated by Zlati Meyer in New York, in collaboration with publishing editor Joe Haberstroh in New York.

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