Jim Zarroli

At 74, Steven Hoffenberg spends a lot of time reflecting on his long and checkered past, which included a lengthy prison sentence for running a Ponzi scheme.

Since last weekend, he says his thoughts have increasingly turned to the man he says conspired with him in that scheme — the notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, who was found dead in his cell at New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center last Saturday.

Updated at 4:12 p.m. ET

Financial markets made it through another volatile day, amid escalating fears that the U.S.-China trade war will further damage a worldwide economy that is already slowing.

Stocks plummeted as soon as the market opened, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 500 points, but they largely recovered by the end of trading. The Dow finished down just 22 points.

Updated at 4:06 p.m. ET

Stocks continue to tumble around the world Monday after China allowed its currency to slide, in the latest sign of economic tensions between Beijing and Washington.

After falling more than 900 points earlier in the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 767 points, a drop of 2.9%. The blue chip index has fallen more than 6% from last month's all-time high, while the S&P 500 index lost ground for the sixth day in a row.

Technology stocks such as Apple and IBM were hit especially hard.

Updated at 5:06 p.m. ET

President Trump announced Thursday that the United States will impose a new 10% tariff on $300 billion worth of products imported from China, saying Beijing had broken some of the promises it made in trade negotiations.

The new tariffs, which are set to take effect Sept. 1, represent another ratcheting up in trade tensions between the countries and sent stocks falling sharply.

When Nancy Dunne goes to see her family outside Chicago, she likes to fly Southwest Airlines from Newark Liberty International Airport near her home in Maplewood, N.J.

Starting in November, she'll need to make alternate arrangements.

Last week, Southwest announced it would no longer fly to Newark. The grounding of the Boeing 737 Max after two deadly crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia has caused the airline to cancel flights and consolidate routes into places such as Newark, which are less profitable.

Updated at 1:10 p.m. ET

Former New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who died Sunday just 10 days short of his 100th birthday, was a towering figure in law enforcement, taking on mobsters, corrupt banks, murderers, drug dealers and crooked politicians.

During 40 years in public life, the patrician Morgenthau oversaw the prosecution of some of New York's most infamous criminals, including subway shooter Bernhard Goetz, Tyco Chairman Dennis Kozlowski and Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon.

To visit California's Imperial Valley is to enter a sleepy place worlds away from the glamorous boomtowns of California's coast. Pickups outnumber BMWs. Vast farms irrigated by the Colorado River stretch as far as the eye can see. Few tourists walk its hot, dusty streets.

Yet the valley lies just two hours from the beaches and swanky subdivisions of San Diego, in the hard, rocky desert terrain near the Mexican border.

Ames, Iowa, has the lowest unemployment rate in the country. That's great for workers — but a challenge for those looking for them.

Tanisha Cortez is one of those benefiting from this tight labor market. The restaurant where Cortez worked closed in late November, so she went looking for a new job. She submitted applications to about half a dozen companies.

Almost right away, she got offers from every one of them. And she was working again at a new restaurant two weeks later. She will earn $2,000 more a year than she made at her old job.

One morning a year ago, federal immigration agents swept into the Midwest Precast Concrete plant in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, and arrested 32 men who were working there illegally.

"I was in the car eating when all of a sudden they all arrived," one worker tells NPR. "They took me out of the car and put handcuffs on me and on everyone else too. They even had a dog." The worker did not want his name used because his case is being heard by a judge.

Bob Best enthusiastically supports President Trump's tough policies against China and other countries.

"I'm not a big tariff guy. I'm a free trade guy," says Best, who manages a heating and air conditioning company in Kennesaw, Ga.

"But sometimes when the bully just doesn't listen, you've got to punch him in the mouth. And that's what he's doing."

Updated at 12:01 a.m. ET Friday

U.S. and Chinese negotiators will resume their high-stakes trade negotiations in Washington on Friday, hours after a scheduled increase in U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods took effect.

The Trump administration raised tariffs on $200 billion in imported products from China at 12:01 a.m. ET Friday, significantly raising the stakes in the ongoing trade dispute with Beijing.

Updated at 10:00 p.m. ET

In a significant escalation of rhetoric, senior Trump administration officials accused Beijing of reneging on commitments it had already made in its on-going trade dispute with China, and they said they plan to increase tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports from 10% to 25% starting on Friday.

Updated at 3:49 p.m. ET

President Trump has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to keep two banks from responding to congressional subpoenas, setting up a legal showdown with Democrats eager to investigate his finances.

The president, his three oldest children and his business, The Trump Organization, say the investigations by the House intelligence and Financial Services committees are overbroad and serve no purpose beyond harassment.

Updated at 2:23 p.m. ET

The heads of some of the nation's biggest banks faced tough questions from Democrats on Wednesday about overdraft fees, the stability of the banking system and their own multimillion-dollar compensation.

The House Financial Services Committee hearing was titled, "Holding Megabanks Accountable: A Review of Global Systemically Important Banks 10 years after the Financial Crisis."

Updated at 3:29 p.m. ET

Bank of America will raise the minimum wage for its employees to $20 an hour in the next two years and freeze health care cost increases for lower-paid workers, the company said Tuesday.

The hourly pay will rise to $17 starting May 1 and then increase to the higher rate by 2021, CEO Brian Moynihan said.

Updated at 8:30 P.M. ET

The acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration defended his agency against criticism that it waited too long to ground Boeing 737 Max planes after a pair of deadly crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

Daniel Elwell told a Senate subcommittee that the FAA waited longer than other countries to order the move earlier this month because it wanted to see flight data that might help explain how the Ethiopian Airlines crash happened.

Updated at 10:45 p.m. ET

President Trump said Friday he will nominate conservative TV commentator and former Trump campaign adviser Stephen Moore to one of two vacant seats on the Federal Reserve Board.

Moore, 59, has joined the president in criticizing the central bank, led by Chairman Jerome Powell, for raising interest rates.

"I have known Steve for a long time — and have no doubt he will be an outstanding choice!" Trump said in a tweet.

The U.S. trade deficit soared to a 10-year high in 2018 on the heels of a strong economy, despite President Trump's ongoing efforts to bring it down through tariffs on imported goods.

For 2018 as a whole, the deficit grew to $621 billion — the highest since 2008, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. When the service sector is excluded, the gap was even greater, rising to a record $891.3 billion.

In the 1980s, China was beginning a long economic boom that would transform the global trading system, and Michael Korchmar decided to go there to launch a joint venture.

He quickly soured on the country.

"It didn't feel right," recalls Korchmar, whose family runs a 102-year-old Florida-based company that makes briefcases and travel bags. The Chinese government maintained a heavy hand in his staffing and factory decisions, and its minders followed him everywhere.

Updated at 11:33 a.m. ET

The U.S. economy expanded at a solid 2.6 percent rate during the last three months of 2018, but growth was significantly lower than it had been earlier in the year, the government said Thursday.

For 2018 as a whole, the economy grew 2.9 percent, a touch below the Trump administration's projected target of 3 percent.

When U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer was growing up in Ashtabula, Ohio, in the 1950s, it was a thriving port town on Lake Erie where everyone who wanted one found a job. Ships brought in iron ore destined for the steel mills of Pennsylvania, and left with coal from the mines of Appalachia.

But as steel and coal have declined, the Ashtabula of Lighthizer's childhood has disappeared, taking a lot of jobs with it.

President Trump has nominated Treasury Department official David Malpass, a vocal critic of the World Bank, to head the international financial institution.

Malpass, 62, is a conservative with longstanding ties to Trump. He once worked as chief economist at investment bank Bear Stearns, which collapsed in 2008 in the midst of the financial crisis. He also served in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. At Treasury, Malpass is currently involved in tense trade negotiations with China.

When U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer was growing up in Ashtabula, Ohio, in the 1950s, it was a thriving factory town with a busy port where freighters brought iron ore to be used in the steel mills of Pennsylvania.

Today, many of the biggest factories have long since left the region for low-wage places — taking a lot of jobs with them — and the port ships a fraction of the freight it once did.

Updated at 5 p.m. ET

The partial shutdown of the government reduced federal spending by about $3 billion and cut into overall U.S. economic growth, according to a report released Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The report says that because of the shutdown, which lasted from Dec. 22 through last Friday, about $18 billion in discretionary government spending was delayed. Most of the money will be spent later, now that the shutdown has ended.

President Trump used his first prime-time address from the Oval Office to make the case for his controversial border wall. The president's demand for $5.7 billion in wall funding — and Democrats' opposition — has led to a partial shutdown of the federal government.

Here we check some of the arguments made by the president and top Democrats in their response.

Trump's Speech

Claim 1: Humanitarian and security crisis

"There is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our Southern border."

The stock market has left many investors struggling to catch their breath.

Just last Wednesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained a record 1,086 points, after sliding 653 points on Christmas Eve. And there were many more days, when the markets swung by hundreds of points. In general, 2018 was a unusually bumpy year for markets.

Steve Heimoff remembers coming home from a restaurant December 10, 2008, to find an email from a cousin with the words "Bad news" in the subject line.

The $2 million retirement nest egg he had counted on was suddenly wiped out, as was much of the savings of his relatives, casualties of the multibillion-dollar Bernie Madoff scam that was dominating the headlines.

Updated at 9:01 a.m. ET Wednesday

Stock prices tumbled Tuesday amid investor fears about trade, wiping out the gains that followed the Trump administration's decision to delay higher tariffs on imports from China.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 799 points, losing 3.1 percent of its value, while the S&P 500 index fell 3.2 percent. The Nasdaq composite index plunged 3.8 percent.

In another worrisome sign for the economy, the interest rate on short-term U.S. Treasury securities actually rose above that of longer-term instruments.