President-elect Donald Trump’s meetings with CEOs seeking federal approval for major mergers are raising red flags for ethics lawyers concerned that about the possible erosion of a firewall between the regulators tasked with approving the billion-dollar deals and the White House.
Trump met this week with the heads of German chemical company Bayer and seed and herbicide giant Monsanto, who made their case for their $57 billion merger. The deal would likely need to be approved by Trump’s choices to lead antitrust enforcement at the Justice Department. On Thursday, Trump sat down to discuss jobs with the chief executive of AT&T, which is trying to acquire Time Warner.
Presidents typically keep their distance from such reviews, so as not to appear to be exerting political influence on a regulatory process intended to evaluate the impact a merger could have on competition and consumers. Trump’s closed-door sessions suggest the incoming president may be less worried with appearing to be close to pending deals that require government approval.
„While it’s true the Department of Justice is under the executive branch, it’s not appropriate for the president to make that regulatory decision — and certainly not for political considerations,“ said Bruce Green, a law school professor at Fordham University who specializes in ethics.
Green equated the meetings to a 2016 campaign controversy: Bill Clinton’s conversation with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the Phoenix airport tarmac at a time when the Justice Department was looking into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
„If the conversation is private, it will raise questions and suspicions,“ Green said.
Part of the challenge is not knowing what was precisely said at the meetings.
„We don’t know really what they were discussing, what Trump’s response was to that and to what extent that will influence the antitrust review,“ said Maurice Stucke, a former attorney in the Justice Department’s antitrust division who teaches at the University of Tennessee College of Law.
On Wednesday, Werner Baumann, Bayer CEO, and Hugh Grant, Monsanto CEO, talked about their merger as in the broader conversation on innovation, Monsanto said in a statement.
AT&T specifically denied talking about its proposed $85.4 billion merger when CEO Randall Stephenson met Thursday with Trump. The company said its conversation focused on how it could increase its U. S. investments, create jobs and make American companies more competitive.
Trump’s choice for attorney general told senators this week that incoming administration would be transparent.
„The antitrust policies of the United States have to be consistent and as clear as possible,“ Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions said at his confirmation hearings.
„I have no hesitation, if the finding justifies it, to say that certain mergers should not occur and there will not be political influence in that process,“ he said.
During the campaign, Trump opposed the combination of the telecom AT&T and Time Warner, the media conglomerate that owns HBO and CNN. „It’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few,“ Trump said at the time.
The meetings are part of Trump’s aggressive and unorthodox strategy for job creation, in which he openly cheers on, and sometimes jeers, individual companies. He’s shown himself willing to intervene in even relatively small corporate matters.
On Thursday, Trump tweeted that people should shop at Maine retailer L. Bean, after The Associated Press reported that heiress Linda Bean had contributed to a pro-Trump political action committee and the company was facing calls for a boycott.
Trump has praised the Japanese tech mogul Masayoshi Son, who controls the wireless carrier Sprint, for a commitment to create jobs. He has pushed Ford to scrap plans to build an auto plant in Mexico, which the company did this month in large part due to lower gasoline prices reducing demand for smaller cars.
While Trump has celebrated his approach as using his negotiation skills to save American jobs, others worry the president is inappropriately intervening.
„You’re having companies ingratiating themselves with him-and then decisions being made that affect those companies,“ said Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability. „That poses serious conflict problems. “
Multiple lawyers told The Associated Press that the meetings with firms under antitrust review by the president-elect were unusual, though not necessarily unethical since these meetings could be considered a form of lobbying. Past presidents have waded into antitrust issues, notably Theodore Roosevelt, who sought in 1902 to break up a railroad monopoly.
Trump’s meeting with Bayer and Monsanto generated concerns from the National Farmers Union, which opposes the merger on the grounds that it could harm competition and increase the price of seeds.
„Our members were baffled by that meeting — that there would be time made out for it before a secretary of agriculture nominee is even presented,“ said Rob Larew, senior vice president of public policy at the farmers‘ trade group.

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January 14, 2017
— Happy New Year! Do you have $5,500 to spare?
It’s an uncomfortable question, especially if your credit card is still smoking from last month. There’s no hangover quite like a holiday financial hangover.
But I ask because that’s the amount it takes to fully fund a traditional or Roth IRA for a year, and there’s a lot of value — a five-digit value — in front-loading your contributions.
What that means: If you do have $5,500 — say from an end-of-year bonus, overstuffed emergency fund or taxable investment account — consider adding it to your IRA now, rather than waiting until the contribution deadline as most people do. (If you haven’t yet maxed out your 2016 contribution, do that first. You can contribute until the April 18 tax deadline.)
And if you don’t? You probably already know you’re far from alone. But you can still read this with an eye toward scraping the money together ASAP. January is all about stretch goals, right?
It comes down to compound interest, which is as close as you’ll get to having your own money tree. As your investment earns a return, future returns are based on that now-larger balance.
That’s why a 25-year-old can invest $10,000 today and end up with $100,000 at age 65 — assuming a 6% average annual return — but a 45-year-old would have to invest more than $30,000 to end up with $100,000 by the same age.
A smaller head start makes a pretty striking case, too. You have a little more than 15 months to make an IRA contribution for each tax year, from January until the tax-filing deadline the following April. The robo-advisor Betterment compared average gains on 10 annual $5,500 IRA contributions — one set made on the first possible day in January and one set made the last possible day in April the next year — using 10-year periods of S&P 500 returns since 1928.
The result: The early contributions had a $14,507 balance advantage after 10 years, on average.
“By front-loading, you end up with almost a third more after 10 years,” says Dan Egan, Betterment’s director of behavioral finance and investing. Egan found that only in individual years with serious market crises — the Great Depression, the dot-com bust — did early investors fail to earn a premium.
“This is purely a time in the market effect,” Egan says. “There are periods when you can get unlucky and happen to invest right before a market downturn, and [being early] ends up not being a good thing. But at the end of the day, what’s happening here is you have 15 months that you wouldn’t have if you waited until the following April.”
Your brain thinks now is better than later, too — but by that it means, “Happy hour today, worry about retirement when you’re old and gray.” The pull of instant gratification, as evidenced by the marshmallow test , is strong.
So there’s a behavioral perk to front-loading. The most successful savers treat savings as an expense. When deciding the rent, mortgage or car they can afford, they look at their balance after they’ve set money aside — ideally 10% to 15% of income.
You wouldn’t tell the electric company you’ll be paying only half your bill going forward because you bought a Lexus on a Toyota budget — not without a couple of flashlights handy. Shortchanging your savings to fund spending feels more reasonable, but it’s a good way to turn out the lights on your future self. (I say that somewhat jokingly, but that kind of financial insecurity is a very real concern for millions of retirees .)
When you fund your IRA at the beginning of the year, you’re not just mentally setting aside that money. IRA distribution rules make it hard — but not impossible — to get back.
I’m not pretending that it’s easy to front-load your IRA. Many investors don’t fund them until the last possible second because they don’t have the money until then. NerdWallet’s end-of-year study found that only one-fifth of Americans who are saving for retirement planned to max out their IRA for 2016.
If you contribute a bit from each paycheck instead, you’ll still have a time advantage over people who wait and make their contribution at the finish line each April. This extra bump in investment growth isn’t worth “impoverishing yourself,” as Egan puts it. It’s just a nice bonus.
But if you want to be able to make a January lump-sum contribution for the year, consider this a first push. After all, holiday spending guilt isn’t the only feeling running high now — willpower and resolve are, too. Take advantage.
Arielle O’Shea is a staff writer at NerdWallet, a personal finance website. Email: aoshea@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @arioshea.
This article was written by NerdWallet and was originally published by Forbes .

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PORTLAND — Maine’s scallops have surged to a record high price at the docks this winter after several years of rising in value, according to fishing regulators in the state.
Fishermen harvest Maine scallops with dragging boats or by hand while diving in frigid waters. The scallops are selling for about $13.50 per pound at the dock, the scallop manager for the state Department of Marine Resources said. In 2015, they sold for $12.70, which was a record, and more than three times the price in 2004.
The state’s scallops are sought after in the culinary world and typically sell for about $20 to $25 per pound to customers, which is slightly more than other sea scallops.
This year’s high prices are a boon to fishermen, who seem to be catching about the same amount as last year, said Dana Black, a fisherman out of Blue Hill. He said fishermen have been able to catch large, meaty scallops that are especially prized by buyers.
“This year shouldn’t be any less than last year – in fact, it could be better,” Black said.
Scallop season in Maine runs from December to April, with December often a busy month. But bad weather this December held back some of the fleet from getting on the water. The state is affording fishermen extra days at sea to compensate.
Maine’s scallop fishery is a small piece of the worldwide industry based around the shellfish. The U. S. scallop fishery, based mostly in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey, was worth more than $400 million last year.
The fishery in Maine collapsed a little more than 10 years ago before rebuilding in the wake of conservation efforts. Fishermen caught more than 450,000 pounds of the scallops last year, the third highest total since 2001.
Scallop prices are up partially because dealers are offering more money by the pound for especially big scallops, which appear more plentiful this year, said Trisha Cheney, the scallop manager for the state marine department.
“That’s really indicative of a healthy resource,” she said.
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