Charges dropped

The US Justice Department moved to drop the most grave of four indictments of Donald Trump handed up by grand juries in recent years, asking a federal judge to dismiss his prosecution for allegedly seeking to block the peaceful transfer of power in 2020. Trump, 78, was indicted on charges of conspiring to interfere with Congress’ certification of his electoral loss to now-President Joe Biden. US Special Counsel Jack Smith, pointing to Justice Department rules against prosecuting a sitting president, made the request Monday. President-elect Trump, who pleaded not guilty in the case, has been convicted on multiple felony counts in New York state court tied to hush money payments during the 2016 presidential campaign. Another federal prosecution, over his handling of top secret documents, was thrown out in an unorthodox ruling by a judge he appointed at the end of his first term. And a Georgia state prosecution also tied to the 2020 election has been placed on indefinite hold. —Natasha Solo-Lyons

Former Western Asset Management Co. Co-Chief Investment Officer Ken Leech was charged by US authorities with engaging in an alleged “cherry-picking” scheme to unfairly allocate better-performing trades to favored portfolios and worse-performing trades to others. Leech, 70, was charged by Manhattan federal prosecutors who alleged he allocated trades hours after executing them, often waiting until the end of the trading day or afterward, which went against the firm’s policies. Meanwhile, Manhattan US Attorney Damian Williams will resign on Dec. 13 as the leadership of Wall Street’s main criminal justice overseer transitions to Trump’s new administration. Williams, 44, announced on Monday his plans to step down. Deputy US Attorney Edward Kim will temporarily step into the top job after Williams leaves, as Bloomberg News previously reported. Trump announced earlier this month he would nominate former Securities and Exchange Commission chair Jay Clayton to lead the office.

Will Trump tank the real estate market? The day after his reelection, and even as builders and landlords personally celebrated his win, investors had a grim answer. Property stocks fell 2.6% that day, making real estate the S&P 500’s worst-performing sector. D.R. Horton, the largest US homebuilder, fell 3.8%. CBRE Group, the commercial real estate services firm, fell 4%, while American Tower, which owns wireless communications infrastructure, fell 7.7%. Why do you ask? Well economists are worried that Trump’s promised immigration crackdown would shrink a construction workforce that relies heavily on foreign-born labor.

Citigroup was preparing to declare its wealth business a key piece of the bank’s growth strategy, but behind the scenes, technology kept causing trouble. Ultra-rich clients complained about outdated platforms that didn’t stack up against competitors, and relationship bankers agreed. Again and again, a pair of Dallas-based tech executives had sought to assuage those concerns, flying to New York to give presentations on what they were going to achieve with two years and more than $1 billion. But to the annoyance of senior managers, little was delivered.

Coffee futures in New York climbed to the highest since 1997 on worries about crops in top growing nations, threatening to further raise costs for consumers. Arabica, the high-end variety favored for specialty brews, rose as much as 2.7% on Monday. Coffee prices have soared this year due to major supply disruptions in key producers from Brazil to Vietnam, with the more budget-friendly robusta type that’s used in instant drinks recently hitting the highest since the 1970s.

Macy’s said it would delay its third-quarter earnings release after an investigation revealed an employee hid more than $100 million of expenses. An employee “intentionally” made erroneous accounting accrual entries to hide about $132 million to $154 million of cumulative delivery expenses stretching over multiple years, the company said Monday. The worker, who was responsible for small package delivery expense accounting, is no longer employed with the company.

Dozens of small colleges across the US have slashed prices in recent years in an effort to draw more students. Described as tuition “resets,” struggling institutions are making the moves as families increasingly question the value of high-cost degrees from anywhere except the most elite universities. The markdowns highlight a fault line across higher education. While Ivy League universities and other elite schools approach $100,000 per year, a growing share of smaller, less selective private institutions are cutting costs in a bid to avoid joining the dozens of peers shutting their campus gates for good.

Warren Buffett is donating roughly $1.14 billion of Berkshire Hathaway shares to four family foundations as part of a charitable pledge he made nearly two decades ago. The 94-year-old investor will convert 1,600 of Berkshire’s Class A shares into 2.4 million Class B shares, the Omaha, Nebraska-based conglomerate said Monday. He’ll then give 1.5 million of those shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his late wife, and 300,000 to each of his children’s foundations, the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and NoVo Foundation.

When world’s best restaurant lists are announced, there’s usually one winner. Not so for La Liste, which has just awarded the top spot to nine restaurants this year using an algorithm. The No. 1 honorees are: Le Bernardin in the US; SingleThread in the US; L’Enclume in the United Kingdom; Cheval Blanc by Peter Knogl, in Switzerland; La Vague d’Or in France; Guy Savoy in France; Schwarzwaldstube in Germany; Matsukawa in Japan; and Lung King Heen in Hong Kong. They each got a ranking of 99.5. Click here to read more.

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