Bernie Madoff’s victims to receive final payout totaling $131 million
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(NEW YORK) — The fund disbursing money to the victims of Bernie Madoff’s legendary Ponzi scheme began its 10th and final distribution on Monday, putting another $131 million in the pockets of swindled investors.
Twenty-three thousand victims worldwide are receiving payments, bringing their total recoveries to 94% of their losses. Most of these victims were small investors who lost less than $500,000 in the fraud, according to federal prosecutors.
Since the collapse of Madoff’s investment house and his 2009 guilty plea, the Madoff Victim Fund has paid more than $4 billion to nearly 41,000 victims in 127 countries.
“This office has never stopped pursuing justice for victims of history’s largest Ponzi scheme,” acting U.S. Attorney Edward Y. Kim said.
For decades, Madoff used the investment advisory business he founded in 1960 to steal billions from his clients, turning his wealth management firm into the world’s largest Ponzi scheme to benefit himself, his family and select members of his inner circle.
He was sentenced to 150 years in prison, where he died in 2021.
“The unprecedented scope and complexity of the Madoff remission process shows the power of forfeiture to recover assets and to compensate victims,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brent Wible said in a statement on Monday.
(NEW YORK) — President-elect Donald Trump sharply criticized the rising price of groceries throughout his campaign, even delivering an address outside his New Jersey home in August alongside a table covered with cereal boxes, coffee grounds and ketchup.
A wave of consumer discontent appears to have helped lift him back into the Oval Office, but Trump now faces the task of how to ease voters’ frustration.
Food inflation soared to a peak of more than 10% in 2022, but price increases have slowed to about 2%, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows.
Still, the yearslong bout of rapid inflation has sent food prices soaring more than 25% since President Joe Biden took office.
Typically, prices do not fall across the board unless the economy slows or even tips into recession, which would reduce consumer demand but also impose economic hardship, some economists told ABC News.
Still, Trump could enact policies that may slow the rise of grocery prices, or even lower the cost of some household staples, economists added.
“Prices on different items absolutely could come down,” Michael Faulkender, a professor of finance at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, told ABC News.
In response to ABC News’ request for comment, the Trump transition team said in a statement that Trump intends to fulfill the commitments he made during the campaign. But the transition team did not specifically address the issue of grocery prices.
“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the transition team, told ABC News.
Increase oil production
On the campaign trail, Trump often responded to concern about prices with a three-word mantra: “Drill, baby, drill.”
Trump, who has downplayed human-caused climate change, vowed to bolster the oil and gas industry by easing regulation and expanding output.
In theory, increased oil production could lower food prices since gas makes up a key source of costs throughout the supply chain, whether a firm is growing crops or transporting them to a seller, economists said.
“Energy is a big input cost for food,” David Andolfatto, an economist at the University of Miami, told ABC News. “That should put downward pressure on food prices.”
While such a move could prove beneficial, increased oil output under President Joe Biden coincided with the surge of inflation in recent years. Since oil is sold on a global market, a surge in domestic production may not lower prices for U.S. consumers as much as some may expect.
The U.S. set a record for crude oil production in 2023, averaging 12.9 million barrels per day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a federal agency.
A further uptick in oil production risks accelerating the nation’s carbon emissions and worsening the impact of climate change, which would carry costs down the road, Luis Cabral, a professor of economics at New York University, told ABC News.
“We can’t simply look at the benefits,” Cabral said, acknowledging the potential for lower food prices. “There are also important costs in terms of emissions and climate change.”
Bolster antitrust enforcement
To address high food prices, the Trump administration could crack down on market concentration, a term economists use to describe the dominance of a given industry by a handful of firms, some experts said.
They pointed to the market power of large corporations as a cause of rapid price increases, saying companies use their outsized role in the market to raise prices without fear of a competitor offering a comparable product at a more affordable price.
“Whenever there are fewer players in an industry, prices tend to be higher,” Cabral said. “Supermarkets aren’t an exception.”
Grocery store profit margins surged in 2021 and rose even higher two years later, even after price increases had begun to cool, a Federal Trade Commission study in March showed.
In February, the Federal Trade Commission sued to block the merger of supermarket chains Kroger and Albertsons, which would amount to the largest supermarket merger in U.S. history. The proceedings are ongoing, and will likely stretch into the Trump administration.
Some economists cast doubt over the potential benefits of antitrust, saying the recent bout of inflation coincided with an uptick in production costs during the pandemic. “It’s hard to argue that it’s therefore some kind of profiteering,” Faulkender said.
Price-gouging ban
During the campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris proposed a federal ban on price gouging for food and groceries.
The plan could resemble price-gouging bans in place in 37 states, which prohibit a sudden spike in prices for scarce goods, the Harris campaign said. Those bans prohibit companies from exploiting a sudden imbalance between supply and demand by significantly hiking prices.
While Trump may be reluctant to adopt a policy put forward by his proponent, he could advance a price-gouging ban as a means of preventing acute price increases for specific goods.
For instance, egg prices have skyrocketed 30% over the year ending in October, U.S. Bureau of Statistics data on Wednesday showed. The spike owed primarily to an avian flu outbreak that has decimated supply. Last year, egg prices climbed more than 60% in response to a similar avian flu outbreak.
Economists who spoke to ABC News differed on the effectiveness of a potential price-gouging ban.
Some economists dismissed the policy as a flawed solution, since state-level bans usually get triggered only in the case of emergencies and, even then, often lack clarity about the type of company behavior that constitutes price-gouging.
“I don’t think a federal price-gouging ban would help at all,” Cabral said.
Andolfatto, of the University of Miami, said a price-gouging ban could lower food prices if it barred rapid price increases under some circumstances. However, those benefits may be outweighed by the downside, since such a ban could override the market signal delivered by prices, which help direct the distribution of goods to places where they are in short supply.
“These types of interventions have unintended consequences,” Andolfatto said.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden on Friday announced a decision to block the $14 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel by Japan-based Nippon Steel, saying domestically produced steel is essential to U.S. national security.
“Without domestic steel production and domestic steel workers, our nation is less strong and less secure,” Biden said in a statement.
The move marks the latest effort on the part of the Biden administration to protect U.S. markets from foreign-owned firms.
Biden has preserved many of the tariffs imposed by former President Donald Trump, and he enacted a law that would ban China-based social media platform TikTok later this month if the company doesn’t find a new parent company. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments this month in a legal challenge brought by TikTok.
The decision comes weeks after a federal committee declined to issue a recommendation on the merger, leaving Biden an opportunity to block the deal.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, tasked with the potential acquisition, shared concerns about the national security risks posed by the loss of the country’s second-largest steel producer.
In response to the committee’s decision, Nippon Steel alleged the White House had “impermissible undue influence” on the review. Nippon Steel has previously threatened to challenge the White House decision in court.
The fate of U.S. Steel – a storied 120-year-old firm based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – became a lightning rod during the 2024 election season.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
TikTok said Sunday it’s “restoring service” after a ban in the United States initially began to take effect earlier in the day.
“In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service. We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive,” the company said in a statement. “It’s a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship. We will work with President Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States.”
In a pop-up message visible to users upon reopening the app on Sunday, TikTok again credited President-elect Donald Trump for the app’s return.
“Welcome back! Thanks for your patience and support,” the message read. “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!”
TikTok briefly went dark between late Saturday night and early Sunday.
Last spring, Congress passed a measure with overwhelming bipartisan support granting TikTok a 270-day window to cut its ties with China-based parent company ByteDance or face a ban in the U.S. Instead of initiating a sale, however, TikTok pursued a legal challenge on First Amendment grounds that ended in failure at the Supreme Court on Friday.
The unanimous ruling from the nation’s highest court found merit in national security concerns regarding potential user data collection or content manipulation that the Chinese government might undertake.
The platform became unavailable for some users Saturday evening, with a pop-up message in the app saying, “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now.”
“A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, this means you can’t use TikTok for now,” the message went on. “We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!”
By Sunday morning, the app was unavailable in stores run by Apple, Google and Samsung.
The Biden administration said earlier this week that it would not enforce the ban on Sunday, leaving implementation of the measure to President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office on Monday. Trump has vowed to reverse the ban.
In a Truth Social post on Sunday morning, Trump said he’s “asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark!” He said he would issue an executive order on Monday, his first day in office, “to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.”
“The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order,” he added.
Trump said he wants “the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture.” He said this could be a joint venture between the current owners and new owners.
Earlier Sunday, a Biden administration official accused TikTok of trying to “blame” the situation on the Biden administration, saying “they’ve had a year to deal with it and we were clear we wouldn’t implement it on our final day.”
White House officials had stressed for days that if TikTok were to go dark on Sunday, it would not be because of U.S. enforcement — it would be TikTok’s decision, and that the administration is only kicking the issue to Trump because of the timing.
ABC News’ Michelle Stoddart and Selina Wang contributed to this report.
