A 7% increase in the National Minimum Stipend (NMS), set to come into effect in April, has been welcomed by the trade union Unite.

The increase, agreed by the Archbishops’ Council, acting as the Central Stipends Authority (CSA), will see the minimum stipend jump from £26,134 to £28,670.

Last July, the CSA announced a five-per-cent increase for 2024. The greater uplift to seven per cent has been made possible because dioceses, which will have to fund the stipends, need pay less into the Church of England pensions scheme. In December, the Pensions Board announced a drop in the contribution rate by three percentage points from April this year: to 25 per cent of the previous year’s National Minimum Stipend.

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A seven-per-cent increase in the National Minimum Stipend (NMS), set to come into effect in April, has been welcomed by the trade union Unite https://t.co/jroZM9yEUY

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) February 7, 2024

There’s a striking disconnect between the widely shared pessimism among Americans and measures that show the economy is actually robust. Consumers are spending briskly—behavior that suggests optimism, not retrenchment. Inflation has tempered. Unemployment has been below 4% for 24 straight months, the longest such stretch since the 1960s.

The disconnect has puzzled economists, investors and business owners. But press Americans harder, and the immediate economy emerges as only one factor in the gloomy outlook. Americans feel sour about the economy, many say, because their long-term financial security feels fragile and vulnerable to wide-ranging social and political threats.

Reliable steps up the economic ladder, such as a college degree, no longer look like a good investment. War overseas, and an emboldened set of hostile nations, have made the world feel dangerous. Uninspiring leaders at home, running a government widely seen as dysfunctional, have left people without hope that America is up to the challenge of fixing its problems.

The broad reasons for America’s dim outlook suggest that even further improvement in the economy might not be enough to lift the nation’s mood. In an election year, that is shaping up as one of President Biden’s biggest impediments to winning a second term. He has received little credit so far for an economy that has foiled predictions of a recession and instead grew 3.1% in the past year, far ahead of the pace in 2022.

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Inside the disconnect between gloomy Americans and a robust economy. “There’s a sense it could all go away in a second.” https://t.co/SUUx0JqudF https://t.co/SUUx0JqudF

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) February 7, 2024

The NTSB said the door plug was opened at Boeing’s Renton factory so a team from supplier Spirit AeroSystems of Wichita, Kan., could repair damaged rivets adjacent to the door plug on the 737 MAX 9 jet.

The fix required removal of insulation and interior panels at that location and the opening of the door plug. After the rivets were repaired, a Boeing team worked to restore the interior.

Federal regulations require that every manufacturing job that goes into assembly of an airplane be documented. And critical tasks have to be signed off by quality inspectors.

A month after the blowout, though, Boeing has not provided the NTSB with documentation about who opened and re-closed the door plug, how exactly it was done and with what authorization.

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A Boeing 737 MAX 9 was missing key bolts when it was delivered to Alaska Airlines, the National Transportation Safety Board says in a preliminary report on Flight 1282's blowout over Portland. https://t.co/1ygq2zDdmg

— The Seattle Times (@seattletimes) February 7, 2024

Most emerging economies struggle to live within their means; China struggles to live up to them. Even in the best of times, the combined spending of its households, firms and government is not enough to buy all that it can produce, leaving a surplus that must be exported: the country has run a trade surplus for 34 of the past 40 years. And these are not the best of times. China is enduring its longest spell of deflation since the Asian crisis over a quarter-century ago. An epic stock market rout since late 2022 has seen investors lose $2 trillion.

Behind that panic lies a deeper fear among investors and officials, namely that China no longer has a reliable driver of growth. The property boom is over. Cash-strapped developers are afraid to build flats and households are afraid to buy them. The infrastructure mania has run out of road: indebted local governments lack the funds. Exporting goods to the rest of the world, which China relied on for decades to escape poverty, is getting harder as protectionism rises and Western countries become wary of relying on authoritarian states.

Much therefore rests on one remaining source of growth: boosting the spending of China’s 1.4 billion people.“The Chinese market, with its vast space and growing depth, will play an important role in boosting aggregate global demand,” Li Qiang, China’s prime minister, told the World Economic Forum in Davos last month. A new imf review of China’s prospects published on February 2nd contains 61 references to the word “consumption”.

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As China’s markets crash, its consumers cower https://t.co/ue3QhEh3pS | $AMD $MSFT $T $QQQ $SPX $SPY $ING $GLE $NFLX $DB $BABA $RIVN $NIO $AMD $PACW $PENN $LCID #AEX $NCLH $QQQ $SAVE $SOFI $MARA $AAL $NVO $DIS $AMZN $JPM $CCL $TSLA #CAC #DAX $AMZN $AMC $SPY $AAPL $META $TEAM $X…

— 🇫🇷 🇪🇺 🇩🇪 European Investors News 💯🇩🇪 🇨🇰 (@EuropeanTraders) February 7, 2024

First popularised by a 2017 article in Cosmopolitan magazine, it describes a casual romance between two people that has some of the hallmarks of a formal relationship but without the commitment.

Dating experts say situationships are the natural result of apps such as Tinder, which make it easier for those seeking convenience rather than commitment. And big brands are attempting to capitalise on the trend.

Ahead of February 14, the US makers of Sweethearts — a treat similar to the Love Hearts sold in the UK — released “Situationships” boxes with the usual loved-up messages such as “true love” and “only you” printed in a blurry font.

The Spangler Candy Company said it wanted to “speak to all the people out there in hard-to-read relationships”, and judging by the sales there are plenty of customers. A limited first run of the sweets went on sale last month and was snapped up in four minutes, while another batch made available on Thursday also quickly sold out.

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'“The ambiguous territory that lies between friendship and a committed relationship offers a preferable alternative to the stark solitude of being entirely single and alone.”

Chan said this apprehension has led to the creation of new terms such as “hesidating” and “Foda” (fear…

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) February 5, 2024

For Belinda Mosby, the nightmares started in March.

Mosby had been working at Carelon Behavioral Health, one of the new 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline hotline centers in New Hampshire, for two months. When Mosby started the job in January 2023, she said she was enthusiastic. After 25 years working in the mental health industry as a prison behavioral health specialist, substance abuse counselor and mobile crisis responder, she knew how dire the crisis was. She also said she knew she could help.

“I’m 25 years of preparing for this,” Mosby told ABC News of her thinking at the time.

But quickly, she said she felt overwhelmed. Callers were in such severe distress, she told ABC News. Call after call, Mosby said she began to feel a discomfort set in that she couldn’t shake.

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As 988 centers struggle to hire, burnout plagues some crisis staff.

Data obtained by @ABC News found that, in some states such as Oklahoma and Colorado, more than one-third of employees left within months of taking their first call. https://t.co/9wAjHSUZxB

— ABC News (@ABC) February 1, 2024

Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb said the US deficit is swelling to a point that it would take a miracle to reverse the damage.

“So long as you have Congress keep extending the debt limit and doing deals because they’re afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, that’s the political structure of the political system, eventually you’re going to have a debt spiral,” he said Monday night at an event for Universa Investments, the hedge fund firm he advises. “And a debt spiral is like a death spiral.”

Taleb defined the ballooning debt load as a “white swan,” a risk that’s more probable than a surprise “black swan” event. While he didn’t identify specific outcomes in markets, he did say white swans include both the US deficit and an economy that’s far more vulnerable to shocks than in prior years.

The reason for that, he said, is that the world is far more interconnected due to globalization, with issues in one region able to ricochet around the world.

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Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb says as long as you have a government continually extending the debt limit and doing deals because they're afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, then eventually you're going to have a debt spiral. https://t.co/pQFrtVNqus

— Ben Woodward, CFA (@BennettWoodman) January 31, 2024

It looked like a military campaign. The farmers called it “Operation Paris Siege,” while the French interior minister ordered an “important defensive system” to protect the capital and its airports.

On Monday, angry agriculturalists and their allies deployed their tractors in an attempt to surround Paris, choking major roadways and disrupting not only traffic and trade, but also politics and normal life.

Farmers are emerging as the protest movement of the moment. In multiple countries across Europe, they have been driving their combines and harvesters into the streets to oppose cuts to subsidies and new regulations, some of them designed to reduce climate-changing emissions.

France, of course, is deeply familiar with protests. But as Paris prepares to host the Olympics this summer, and as the country’s ruling political centrists gird for a challenge from the far right in European Parliament elections, the farmer protests have the potential to be particularly destabilizing.

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French farmers deployed their tractors to choke major highways, disrupting not only trade and traffic, but also politics and normal life, to protest subsidy cuts and new regulations. https://t.co/I0TVeKa6aq

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 30, 2024

In a 30-square-mile patch of northern Virginia that’s been dubbed “data center alley,” the boom in artificial intelligence is turbocharging electricity use. Struggling to keep up, the power company that serves the area temporarily paused new data center connections at one point in 2022. Virginia’s environmental regulators considered a plan to allow data centers to run diesel generators during power shortages, but backed off after it drew strong community opposition.

In the Kansas City area, a data center along with a factory for electric-vehicle batteries that are under construction will need so much energy the local provider put off plans to close a coal-fired power plant.

This is how it is in much of the US, where electric utilities and regulators have been caught off guard by the biggest jump in demand in a generation. One of the things they didn’t properly plan for is AI, an immensely power-hungry technology that uses specialized microchips to process mountains of data. Electricity consumption at US data centers alone is poised to triple from 2022 levels, to as much as 390 terawatt hours by the end of the decade, according to Boston Consulting Group. That’s equal to about 7.5% of the nation’s projected electricity demand. “We do need way more energy in the world than we thought we needed before,” Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, whose ChatGPT tool has become a global phenomenon, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week. “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology.”

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AI needs so much power that old coal plants are sticking around https://t.co/VBOC34Uz8j

— Businessweek (@BW) January 25, 2024

The latest development in the industry is upending this dynamic. Private-markets giants are buying and partnering with insurers on an unprecedented scale. This is transforming their business models, as they expand their lending operations and sometimes their balance-sheets. America’s $1.1trn market for fixed annuities, a type of retirement-savings product offered by life insurers, has been the focus so far. But Morgan Stanley, a bank, reckons that asset managers could eventually pursue insurance assets worth $30trn worldwide. Regulators are nervous that this is making the insurance industry riskier. Is the expansion by private-markets giants a land-grab by fast-and-loose investors in a systemically important corner of finance? Or is it the intended consequence of a more tightly policed banking system?

Apollo, which has a well-deserved reputation for financial acrobatics, is leading the way. In 2009 it invested in Athene, a newly formed reinsurance business based in Bermuda. By 2022, when Apollo merged with Athene, the operation had grown to sell more fixed annuities than any other insurer in America. Today Apollo manages more than $300bn on behalf of its insurance business. During the first three quarters of 2023, the firm’s “spread-related earnings”, the money it earned investing policyholders’ premiums, came to $2.4bn, or nearly two-thirds of total earnings.

Imitation can be a profitable form of flattery. kkr’s tie-up with Global Atlantic, an insurer it finished buying this month, resembles Apollo’s bet. Blackstone, meanwhile, prefers to take minority stakes. It now manages $178bn of insurance assets, collecting handsome fees. Brookfield and Carlyle have backed large Bermuda-based reinsurance outfits. tpg is discussing partnerships. Smaller investment firms are also involved. All told, life insurers owned by investment firms have amassed assets of nearly $800bn. And the traffic has not been entirely one-way. In November Manulife, a Canadian insurer, announced a deal to buy cqs, a private-credit investor.

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Wall Street titans are betting big on insurers. What could go wrong? https://t.co/GeGZs4ULQN

— Tim McBride (@mcbridetd on Bluesky) (@mcbridetd) January 24, 2024

ST. GEORGE —The tiny town in northwest Dorchester County might be getting some new next-door neighbors, and more, in one residential influx than it has ever seen before.

If approved by the county, a “cluster” housing development proposed by the D.R. Horton, a national builder, would bring more than 330 new homes and a new zoning designation for roughly 300 rural acres near the “Town of Friendly People.”

While the development would land on Sugar Hill Road outside town limits, St. George would provide water to the development while Dorchester County Water and Sewer would provide sewer services, said Kiera Reinertsen, the county’s planning director. The development would also add an estimated 100 students to Dorchester School District Four and draw on services and amenities from St. George’s Fire Station Nine, Davis-Bailey Park and the town’s library.

“We’ve never had this many houses come in at one time since I’ve been here,” said Mayor Kevin Hart, who has lived in the town for 35 years.

Read it all from the local paper.

With housing demands on a sharp rise in Charleston's tri-county area, the small town of St. George in Dorchester County may see a "cluster" housing project just outside its town limitshttps://t.co/KG8oJtnpVQ

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) January 24, 2024

Americans’ ratings of nearly all 23 professions measured in Gallup’s 2023 Honesty and Ethics poll are lower than they have been in recent years. Only one profession — labor union leaders — has not declined since 2019, yet a relatively low 25% rate their honesty and ethics as “very high” or “high.”

Nurses remain the most trusted profession, with 78% of U.S. adults currently believing nurses have high honesty and ethical standards. However, that is down seven percentage points from 2019 and 11 points from its peak in 2020.

At the other end of the spectrum, members of Congress, senators, car salespeople and advertising practitioners are viewed as the least ethical, with ratings in the single digits that have worsened or remained flat.

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Ethics Ratings of Nearly All Professions Down in U.S.: Nurses remain the most trusted profession.
(Megan Brenan & Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup)
More, via Opinion Today:https://t.co/wHYJF1nkIV pic.twitter.com/ruCnvYuBTR

— Opinion Today (@OpinionToday) January 22, 2024

Americans are rapidly becoming much more upbeat about the economy.

Consumer sentiment surged 29% since November, the biggest two-month increase since 1991, the University of Michigan said Friday, adding to gauges showing improving moods.

It’s a sharp turn after persistently high inflation, the lingering shock from the pandemic’s destruction and fears that a recession was around the corner had put a damper on feelings about the economy in recent years, despite solid growth and consistent hiring.

Now Americans are bucking up as inflation cools and the Federal Reserve signals that interest-rate increases are likely behind us. And with the solid labor market putting money in the bank accounts of freely spending consumers, recession fears for 2024 are fading.

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"Consumer sentiment surged 29% since November, the biggest two-month increase since 1991, the University of Michigan said Friday, adding to gauges showing improving moods."@WSJ @carlquintanilla @HammerstoneMar3 https://t.co/UG9P68j1NK

— Nicholas Brown (@News_By_Nick) January 19, 2024

International trade is constrained by eight primary maritime chokepoints, hard realities imposed by immutable geography. The United States has long recognized a vital national security interest in ensuring freedom of navigation through each of them. This strike helped protect those interests.

Half of these eight global chokepoints are dispersed widely. Only one each can be found in Europe (the Strait of Gibraltar), in Africa (the Cape of Good Hope), in East Asia (the Straits of Malacca), and in the Americas (the Panama Canal). Unfortunately, the other half of these critical chokepoints are all concentrated in a relatively small region where southwestern Asia meets Europe and Africa: the Bosporus Strait, the Suez Canal, the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, and the Strait of Hormuz. This area also happens to be the most important single source of the energy required to sustain global economic growth. Those two facts explain why US presidents keep rediscovering the need to focus disproportionately on the Middle East, despite their often-heartfelt desires to do otherwise.

Today, the greatest threat to these chokepoints is Iran and its proxies. The regime in Tehran has long threatened to shut down Hormuz and repeatedly attacked shipping in the area. Most recently, it even threatened to shut down Gibraltar. The Houthis, Iran’s partner and proxy in Yemen, had repeatedly attacked ships transiting the Bab. The Biden administration recognized the threat, laid the diplomatic predicate, assembled the multilateral coalition, deployed the assets, issued clear warnings, and then took action. This is what professional policymaking looks like. One hopes that the right lessons will be learned in both Sanaa and Tehran.

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The US can no longer afford to underestimate the threat posed by the Houthis, much less the threat posed by the wider network that supports Iranian malign behavior, writes @ACMideast’s @WillWechsler.

Read more. ⬇️ https://t.co/OX8fyHaik7

— Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) January 12, 2024

he share of Americans who own stocks has never been so high.

About 58% of U.S. households owned stocks in 2022, according to the Federal Reserve’s survey of consumer finances released this fall. That is up from 53% in 2019 and marks the highest household stock-ownership rate recorded in the triennial survey. The cohort includes families holding individual shares directly and those owning stocks indirectly through funds, retirement accounts or other managed accounts.

The data provide the most comprehensive snapshot yet of how the Covid-era explosion in investing has reshaped Americans’ personal finances. Stuck at home during the pandemic with extra cash, millions jumped into the stock market for the first time. The elimination of commission fees on stock trading across U.S. brokerages made investing cheaper than ever.

“It created a whole generation of investors,” said Anthony Denier, chief executive of mobile brokerage Webull U.S.

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The percentage of Americans who own stocks has never been higher. The pandemic and zero-commission trading created a whole generation of investors https://t.co/dbbcwsD9zg

— WSJ Markets (@WSJmarkets) December 18, 2023