To retirees, the offers can sound like the answer to every money worry: convert tomorrow’s pension checks into today’s hard cash.

But these offers, known as pension advances, are having devastating financial consequences for a growing number of older Americans, threatening their retirement savings and plunging them further into debt. The advances, federal and state authorities say, are not advances at all, but carefully disguised loans that require borrowers to sign over all or part of their monthly pension checks. They carry interest rates that are often many times higher than those on credit cards.

In lean economic times, people with public pensions ”” military veterans, teachers, firefighters, police officers and others ”” are being courted particularly aggressively by pension-advance companies, which operate largely outside of state and federal banking regulations, but are now drawing scrutiny from Congress and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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The U.S. economy expanded in the first quarter but failed to gather as much steam as expected, raising concerns of another year of sluggish growth.

Consumer spending advanced during the first quarter despite tax increases, but those gains were held in check by slowing business investment and government cutbacks.

The nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of all goods and services produced in the economy, advanced at a 2.5% annual rate between January and March, the Commerce Department said Friday. Economists had forecast a 3.2% expansion.

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We have piles of evidence to show that people overtrust their judgment and overestimate their goodness. Also, there is no easy correlation between self-esteem and actual performance….

This leads to my final question: In society generally, are more problems caused by overconfidence or underconfidence? The financial crisis and the tenor of our political debates suggest that overconfidence and self-idolatry are by far the larger problems. If that’s true, how do you combine the self-critical ability to recognize your limitations with the majestic confidence required to struggle against them?

I guess I’m asking how to marry self-criticism and self-assertion, a blend our society is inarticulate about. I guess I’m wondering, as we make this blend, whether most of us need more of the stereotypically female trait of self-doubt or the stereotypically male trait of self-promotion.

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There are few better places in the world where Tim Keller could write a book about career and calling. “New York City is a place where people live in order to work,” says the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and author most recently of Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work (Dutton). “They basically live more in their work than in their neighborhoods. That . . . means that if you start talking about work, you get right at their hearts.”

In a recent sit-down conversation with This Is Our City executive producer Andy Crouch, Keller explained why he wanted to write a more comprehensive book about faith and work, how he learned to answer congregants’ questions about their work, and what Redeemer has done to equip laypeople to live into their vocations outside the church.

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Culture change in financial services will not be achieved by “light touch” or “heavy touch” regulation, Archbishop Justin said at a Westminster discussion organised by the Bible Society.

Instead the banking sector must adopt “an aim of service to society and not mere rent-seeking, and a culture of virtue based in the realities of daily life and not a fantasy nirvana,” he said.

Describing what this change of culture might look like, the Archbishop said it would require “a ruthless honesty and a deep willingness to be made very uncomfortable indeed through listening to things one does not want to hear”.

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In March, 7.6 million Americans who want more hours were stuck in part-time jobs, about the same as a year earlier and three million more than there were when the recession began at the end of 2007.

These almost invisible underemployed workers do not count toward the standard jobless rate of 7.6 percent. A broader measure, which includes the involuntary part-timers as well as people who want to work but have stopped looking, stands at 13.8 percent.

“There’s nothing inherently wrong with people taking part-time jobs if they want them,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial in Chicago. “The problem is that people are accepting part-time pay because they have no other choice.”

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My read of the evidence is that the Affordable Care Act will have a much tougher first year than was initially anticipated but it won’t be the catastrophe that Republicans hope. The exceptions will be a handful of states where Republican governors have purposefully made it a catastrophe, but that’s likely to make the Republican governors look bad, particularly if the law is working smoothly in states that have tried to make it a success.

Conservative commentary on the law, with its continuous predictions of explosive premium hikes (and continuous omissions of the offsetting subsidies) and gleeful celebration anytime anything looks to be going wrong, is risking the mistake that the Obama administration made early on with the sequester. When the predictions of pain and chaos didn’t instantly come true, the whole narrative shifted in an instant.

Republicans have done a very good job prepping the country for the pain of Obamacare. They’ve not done a good job prepping the country for the people who will be helped by Obamacare.

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South Carolina’s job market is on the brink of widespread recovery, reaching the lowest unemployment rate last month in four and a half years, economists said Friday.

The state’s jobless rate dipped to 8.4 percent in March from 8.6 percent in February, with every county in the state showing improvement, according to a report from the S.C. Department of Employment and Workforce. The national rate fell to 7.6 percent from 7.7 percent.

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[Archbishop Vincent] Nichols is hardly alone ”“ and not wrong ”“ in worrying that some businesses have ethical problems. The concern explains why business ethics has become a standard part of the curriculum in MBA programmes, and the existence of numerous initiatives to promote corporate social responsibility and other virtues. The main problem with these worthy efforts is blandness: it’s not clear what business ethics classes are supposed to teach or what, for example, should be the aim of the Westminster archdiocese’s programme “A Blueprint for Better Business”.

One possibility is that ethical instruction should induce qualms. Moral training might have restrained the captains of finance from excessive bets and pay demands before and after the 2009 crisis, but I doubt it.

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At this time of year, when most Americans have just filed their returns, exasperation with the income tax system reaches a peak. Hardly anyone denies it’s a complex mess. In 2010, calculating their taxes cost Americans $168 billion, estimates the Taxpayer Advocate Service of the Internal Revenue Service. That’s about 15 percent of taxes collected ”” a heavy overhead. Almost 60 percent of taxpayers pay accountants or other tax preparers. Public esteem for the tax system is low; in a 2011 Pew poll, 55 percent judged it unfair. Disaffection was fairly even politically: 47 percent among Republicans, 58 percent among Democrats and 56 percent among independents.

So “tax reform” ought to be a cinch, right? Well, no.

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Commodity prices have been falling since September, culminating in a rout over the past two weeks. That is a classic warning for the global economy.

It is becoming ever clearer that the roaring boom in global equities since last summer has priced in an economic recovery that does not in fact exist. The International Monetary Fund has had to nurse down its global growth forecasts yet again. We are still stuck in an old-fashioned trade depression, with pervasive over-capacity in manufacturing plant and a record global savings rate of 25pc of GDP.

German car sales fell 17pc in March. That should puncture the last illusions that Germany is about to pull Europe out of a self-inflicted slump.

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An Arizona bill that could leave many employees of religious schools and daycares ineligible for unemployment benefits is on the verge of becoming law.

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American workers are being fired or laid off less often than at any time in the last decade, the government reported this week. But companies are also less willing to hire than they used to be.

The Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for February showed that during that month the total number of people who were either discharged or laid off totaled just 0.9 percent of all job holders in the United States. It was the first month since that survey began in 2000 that the figure dipped below 1 percent.

Over the most recent 12 months, the Labor Department figures show, only 15.1 percent of workers lost their jobs because of layoffs or discharges. Until this year, the lowest figure for any 12 months had been 15.3 percent, during the period ending in September 2006. That came as the economic boom was cresting before the recession that began at the end of 2007.

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At the end of 2012, buyers bought homes that were three times their annual income, up from 2.6 times before the housing bubble.

The disparity is stark in high-priced areas such as San Jose, where home buyers are purchasing homes for seven times their yearly salary. Meanwhile, in Detroit, the purchase price is typically just 1.5 times a buyer’s salary.

Homes appear more affordable because low mortgage rates are painting a distorted picture of the market, said Stan Humphries, chief economist at Zillow.

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Boeing Co. said today it will invest another $1 billion and add at least 2,000 jobs at its North Charleston 787 campus by 2020, citing steep demand for commercial airplanes over the next two decades.

The company’s “phase two” growth plans are expected to be part of in a bill to be introduced around noon in the General Assembly in Columbia.

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The unexpectedly large number of American workers who piled into the Social Security Administration’s disability program during the recession and its aftermath threatens to cost the economy tens of billions a year in lost wages and diminished tax revenues.

Signs of the problem surfaced Friday, in a dismal jobs report that showed U.S. labor force participation rates falling last month to the lowest levels since 1979, the wrong direction for an economy that instead needs new legions of working men and women to drive growth and sustain a baby boomer generation headed to retirement.

Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist for J.P. Morgan, estimates that since the recession, the worker flight to the Social Security Disability Insurance program accounts for as much as a quarter of the puzzling drop in participation rates, a labor exodus with far-reaching economic consequences.

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Yummy Mummy, a little boutique on New York’s Upper East Side, has suddenly become a health care provider/online superstore. The company has been hiring like crazy, and just opened an online call center and a warehouse in Illinois. Yummy Mummy even hired somebody to talk to customers’ health insurance companies.

And new moms now seem more likely to splurge on fancy new breast pumps. Caroline Shany, a Yummy Mummy customer, spent her own money to buy a breast pump for her first baby. She may buy another one now because insurance will pick up the tab.

“Why not?” she says.

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American employers hired at the slowest pace in nine months in March, a sign that Washington’s austerity drive could be stealing momentum from the economy.

The economy added just 88,000 jobs last month and the jobless rate ticked a tenth of a point lower to 7.6 percent largely due to people dropping out of the work force, Labor Department data showed on Friday.

Analysts polled by Reuters had expected a gain of 200,000.

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A new fight is brewing over health insurance companies letting millions of Americans renew their current coverage for another year ”” and thereby avoid changes under the federal healthcare law.

That may offer a short-term benefit for certain consumers and shield some of those individual policyholders from potentially steep rate increases. But critics say this maneuver could undermine government efforts to remake the insurance market next year and keep premiums affordable overall.

At issue is a little-known loophole in President Obama’s landmark legislation that enables health insurers to extend existing policies for nearly all of 2014. This runs contrary to the widespread belief that all health insurance must immediately comply with new federal rules starting Jan. 1, when most provisions of the law take effect.

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Unable to meet tight deadlines in the new health care law, the Obama administration is delaying parts of a program intended to provide affordable health insurance to small businesses and their employees ”” a major selling point for the health care legislation.

The law calls for a new insurance marketplace specifically for small businesses, starting next year. But in most states, employers will not be able to get what Congress intended: the option to provide workers with a choice of health plans. They will instead be limited to a single plan.

This choice option, already available to many big businesses, was supposed to become available to small employers in January. But administration officials said they would delay it to 2015 in the 33 states where the federal government will be running insurance markets known as exchanges. And they will delay the requirement for other states as well.

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On Jan. 30, the Obama administration unveiled a long list of exemptions from the ObamaCare insurance mandate. Flaws and contradictions in the law will cause millions of people to be uninsured. The administration also estimated that the cheapest family plan will cost $20,000 by 2016. This new information indicates that the Affordable Care Act is failing in both goals: making insurance affordable and covering the uninsured.

Children are the biggest victims. The hastily drafted law, passed before it was read, overlooked them.

The law says that beginning in 2014, employers with 50 or more full-time employees must offer coverage or pay a penalty. The law’s sloppy drafting left it unclear whether that meant worker’s coverage or family coverage.

Read it all from IBD.

…the Labor Department’s latest jobs snapshot and other recent data reports present a strong case for crowning baby boomers as the greatest victims of the recession and its grim aftermath.

These Americans in their 50s and early 60s ”” those near retirement age who do not yet have access to Medicare and Social Security ”” have lost the most earnings power of any age group, with their household incomes 10 percent below what they made when the recovery began three years ago, according to Sentier Research, a data analysis company.

Their retirement savings and home values fell sharply at the worst possible time: just before they needed to cash out. They are supporting both aged parents and unemployed young-adult children, earning them the inauspicious nickname “Generation Squeeze.”

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The finances of the US’s multi-employer pension schemes have deteriorated so quickly over the past year that the body that insures them will almost certainly run out of cash in 20 years, according to a new report.

The chances of the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation ”“ the publicly created but privately funded body that insures the nation’s occupational pension schemes ”“ going bust went from 1 in 3 at the end of 2011 to more than 9 in 10 by the end of 2012, a report prepared for the PBGC and released on Tuesday said.

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As our world continues to move online, the Internet must make room and the web must stretch.

For Google, which hosts countless websites, emails, documents, videos and more, that means more storage capacity, which means more data centers.

The Internet search giant took a big step in that direction Friday, revealing plans to double its previous investment in Berkeley County by spending another $600 million on the data center complex there….

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Late one night 20 years ago, when I was an oil executive rather than an Anglican bishop, I had run out of steam and patience toward the end of a complex multinational acquisition. We came to yet another bit of box ticking and I suggested we skip it, because we knew the material was accurate.

“Justin,” our wise investment-bank director said quietly, “you know that’s not how we do it.”

Under pressure, everyone is prone to make bad decisions and that story remains in my mind as I sit on the U.K.’s Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, listening to people talk about banks, bankers and their failures.

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It’s a baby boomer’s nightmare. One moment you’re 40-ish and moving up, the next you’re 50-plus and suddenly, shockingly, moving out ”” jobless in a tough economy.

Too young to retire, too old to start over. Or at least that’s the line. Comfortable jobs with comfortable salaries are scarce, after all. Almost overnight, skills honed over a lifetime seem tired, passé. Twenty- and thirty-somethings will gladly do the work you used to do, and probably for less money. Yes, businesses are hiring again, but not nearly fast enough. Many people are so disheartened that they’ve simply stopped looking for work.

For millions of Americans over 50, this isn’t a bad dream ”” it’s grim reality….[and] though there is no single path, there are success stories that offer hope….

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A large and growing share of American workers are tapping their retirement savings accounts for non-retirement needs, raising broad questions about the effectiveness of one of the most important savings vehicles for old age.

More than one in four American workers with 401(k) and other retirement savings accounts use them to pay current expenses, new data show. The withdrawals, cash-outs and loans drain nearly a quarter of the $293 billion that workers and employers deposit into the accounts each year, undermining already shaky retirement security for millions of Americans.

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On Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg will sit in judgment on a series of cases that have far-reaching implications for religious freedom in this country. Two of the cases involve devout women who were banned from wearing the most important symbol of the Christian faith ”“ the cross.
Shirley Chaplin, an experienced nurse, had worn her confirmation cross on a small chain around her neck, without incident, throughout nearly 30 years of frontline nursing. Then, one day, she was told to remove it.

In the case of British Airways check-in clerk Nadia Eweida, a national campaign was mounted when BA banned her from wearing her cross. But the airline refused to compensate her for months of being suspended without pay and subsequent tribunals have disputed her claims of discrimination.

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My household has more than its share of student and credit card debt. I didn’t expect my salary to be frozen for half a decade, and I assumed the spending was a temporary solution to a temporary problem. Bad assumption. Two months ago, I got a notice from my student loan company telling me that my monthly payment was about to double. It took a minute, but I thought back to the day I agreed to those repayment terms. By the time my payment obligations spike, I remember thinking, I’ll be so flush that it won’t even be an issue….

There have been many far more serious victims of the Great Recession and the anemic recovery than me, of course ”” people who have lost their jobs, their homes, breadwinners who have lost a defining sense of self. Although I have never felt more than a step or two away, I still have a home and I still have a job.

But too often there has not been a distinction made between the victims and people, like me ”” among the majority of Americans who are not unemployed or underemployed, but didn’t act as prudently as they should have ”” who made poor decisions.

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An anniversary slipped by this year that cannot – and must not – go unremarked. It is a decade since Virginia Haussegger’s pivotal ”The sins of our feminist mothers” was published on this page. Haussegger’s opinion piece articulated the anger and frustration of a generation of women left childless as a result of their feminist mothers promoting the myth of ”having it all”: the career, the husband and the babies. The article hit a collective nerve. A book followed recording Haussegger’s personal account of feminism, career, relationships, health, and, ultimately biological childlessness.

The messages resonated with women of Haussegger’s generation and with mine. Wonder Woman: The Myth of Having It All was the talk of every woman in town.

Thanks to brave women like Haussegger, my generation received the message loud and clear to look after their reproductive health; to not delay pregnancy too long. We have been successfully reprogrammed to hear the biological clock ticking. Unfortunately, this is not a gentle while-away-the-hours-type ticking. Rather, it is a nuclear-bomb-is-about-to-explode-so-PANIC-NOW-style ticking. I sometimes wonder if this has done more harm than good; if, in fact, it would be better not to know.

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