WSJ What’s News
Trump Administration Backs Away From White-Collar Criminal Enforcement
Mon, 14 Apr 2025
P.M. Edition for April 14. The U.S. administration is backing away from cases involving foreign bribery, public corruption, money laundering and crypto markets. WSJ reporter Dave Michaels says the administration is effectively redefining what business conduct constitutes a crime. And WSJ reporter Peter Grant says Trump’s appetite for tariffs is threatening a post-Covid bounce for the U.S. office space market. Plus, what’s at stake for Meta Platforms—which owns Instagram and WhatsApp—in its antitrust trial brought by the Federal Trade Commission. Pierre Bienaimé hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What changes is the Trump administration making in white-collar crime enforcement?
— White-collar crime or cases against executives where there are not clear victims from the misconduct, those don't appear to be popular.
Plus, the president's trade war threatens the office space market recovery. And Meta fights to keep Instagram and WhatsApp as its antitrust trial begins. It's Monday, April 14th. I'm Pierre Bien-Aimé for The Wall Street Journal, filling in for Alex Osola. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that moved the world today. U.S.
investors welcomed a tariff rollback for the tech industry. The exemption for smartphones, computers, and memory chips amounts to a big reprieve for Apple and others that make many items in China. President Trump said this afternoon that he's looking at some tariff pauses to help automakers as well. Shares of companies like Ford and General Motors perked up on the news. In U.S.
markets today, the S&P 500 and the Dow rose about 0.8%, while the Nasdaq Composite rose about 0.6%. Facebook owner Meta Platforms squared off with the Federal Trade Commission today in the start of a trial that could shape the future of antitrust enforcement and force the company to break itself up by selling Instagram and WhatsApp.
The FTC wants to compel Meta to undo its acquisitions of those two platforms, alleging it wields an illegal monopoly in social media, something Meta denies. WSJ reporter Megan Bobrowski covers Meta and social media and says the company has a lot to lose.
A big chunk of Meta's ad revenue is at stake. Instagram is projected to bring in 50% of Meta's ad revenue this year. And so they could lose half of their ad revenue potentially. Instagram is growing among users 18 to 24. And among that group, Facebook is expected to see a 2% decline this year. And so
Instagram is important because it's this way that Meta is continuing to reach young people and bring in new users. This trial is also important in that it sets the stage for what antitrust enforcement could look like in the future.
Some people in the industry thought that with Donald Trump coming to power again, he maybe wouldn't be as hard on some of these companies, and that is proving to not be the case at all.
The trial in Washington is scheduled to take about eight weeks. The graphics chip maker Nvidia said it would start producing AI supercomputers manufactured entirely in the United States. The announcement, made today in a blog post, comes a day after the Trump administration said tariffs are coming for semiconductor imports.
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Chapter 2: How are tariffs affecting the post-COVID office space market?
What's the administration itself saying? Are they talking about a new focus?
The administration is saying that they are still committed to white-collar enforcement broadly. They say that they want to recoup victims' losses when victims are harmed by fraud, and that they want to make sure that there's integrity in markets and financial institutions.
That was Wall Street Journal reporter Dave Michaels. Dave, thanks so much. Thanks very much. And you can read our full report about how the Trump administration is retreating from white-collar crime enforcement on WSJ.com. We'll leave a link in the show notes.
In other news, Harvard University said today it will resist the Trump administration's demands to change its governance structure to stop anti-Semitism on campus. The school said the government is overstepping its authority.
Harvard's response sets up a significant fight between the nation's wealthiest university and the federal government, which has threatened to withhold nearly $9 billion in grants and contracts to the university and its affiliated hospitals.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said today he doesn't have the authority to bring a migrant mistakenly deported to a maximum security prison in his country back to the U.S. Bukele made the comments during a meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office.
Kilmar Abrego-Garcia lived with his family in Maryland and was deported in what the Trump administration acknowledged was an administrative error. It's a volatile time for markets, and you may be wondering what that means for your own investments.
Wall Street Journal personal economics reporter Imani Moise spoke to our Your Money Briefing podcast, and she was asked whether stock owners should take the recent market swings as an opportunity to do a gut check.
Absolutely, especially if you're on the younger side, because if you've set up your portfolio really in the last five years, then you're very used to things going well for yourself. So a lot of advisors are telling me that clients are realizing that their risk tolerance isn't as high as they thought it was when markets were doing really, really well, now that markets aren't in such great shape.
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