Day: July 7, 2024

A Ukrainian drone triggers warehouse explosions in Russia as a war of attrition grinds on  WANE

From Cold War to the Ukraine war: NATO at 75  The Anniston Star

The offers and details on this page may have updated or changed since the time of publication. See our article on Business Insider for current information.

Affiliate links for the products on this page are from partners that compensate us and terms apply to offers listed (see our advertiser disclosure with our list of partners for more details). However, our opinions are our own. See how we rate products and services to help you make smart decisions with your money.

The writer is not pictured.

Delmaine Donson/Getty Images

• For Love & Money is a weekly Business Insider column answering relationship and money questions.
• This week, a reader who realized marriage is a dealbreaker doesn’t want to actually break the deal.
• Our columnist says they should lead with honesty to find a solution.
• Got a question for our columnist? Write to For Love & Money using this Google form.

Dear For Love & Money,

My boyfriend of nine years says he doesn’t believe in marriage because his parents had an ugly divorce. I knew this early on because he warned me that he would never get married, and I guess I thought I could live with it, and maybe some small part of me hoped I could get him to change his mind.

But now we’re nearly a decade in, talking about having kids, and I realize that getting married is a dealbreaker for me.

There are obviously tax advantages to getting married and financial disadvantages to having kids with someone who isn’t your spouse.

My friends all say my only options are to accept his decision or to break up with him and find someone else. They’re probably right, but I’m hoping there’s a third way. Any ideas? 

Sincerely,

Flip flopper

Dear Flip flopper,

If we’re being literal, your friends are right. You only have two choices: stay or leave. That said, there are assurances, questions, and compromises that can make these options less brutal than either a sweeping acceptance of your boyfriend’s wishes or dumping him.

However, before we dive into what some of those options look like, you must begin by honestly charting your path from being “maybe” OK with never getting married to where you are now, recognizing this may be a dealbreaker. Self-awareness is essential to making big decisions you won’t regret later. The important thing is not to judge yourself in this process.

Your actions and words are misaligned

When it comes to high-stakes choices like getting married, starting a family, changing your mind, or hoping your boyfriend would change his mind, it’s only fair to recognize the social pressure just to be cool. We all feel this pressure, and when we do, it’s easy to pretend even to ourselves that we feel the way we think others expect us to feel rather than honoring our actual desires.

My therapist calls this behavior “misalignment.” The goal is to make sure who you are on the inside is aligned with how you represent yourself on the outside. Sometimes, this means getting real with ourselves and other people about the parts of us that feel a bit embarrassing. For instance, admitting we desire old-fashioned, traditional ideals like marriage, even when the concept grows more passé each year. Or, admitting even less flattering truths, like formerly believing we could change the mind of a man who was always abundantly clear about his plans.

Speaking of your boyfriend, as painful as it may be to admit you want different things, you have to respect his alignment. He demonstrated unwavering loyalty to his most authentic self, and your best bet is to follow his example.

Compromise is still on the table 

This may sound like I’m suggesting that you two break up. After all, if your authentic self wants to get married and his authentic self doesn’t, what other options do you have? But loyalty to self doesn’t mean you must be self-serving and inflexible. Instead, you can use self-awareness as a starting point in your negotiations.

We all want lots of things to varying degrees, and determining what to compromise and what to keep becomes a matter of priorities. You may find that you and your boyfriend share the highest priority: each other. If this is the case, finding a compromise that will address your financial concerns as well as your boyfriend’s emotional considerations is more than doable.

As you negotiate this compromise, remember that neither of you is wrong for wanting different things. This is not a fight with a win/lose outcome but a collaboration that will leave both of you feeling like winners.

Honesty must be the framework of this conversation. Tell your boyfriend why marriage is important to you. You’ve likely pointed out the financial incentives to marriage, but this time, be sure to explain the peace of mind those financial incentives will give you and why you feel you need it. In turn, encourage him to articulate his feelings about marriage and why. 

Once you’ve both laid this foundation of honest vulnerability, you can build your compromise. For instance, if you’re worried about having kids with him only to end up as a single parent should he leave you, you could ask your boyfriend for a financial commitment upfront to ease the insecurity of a no-legal-strings-attached relationship status. Perhaps he could set up a trust in your name where he compensates you for the years you are entrusting with him. 

Or, if his marriage issues come down to the ugly details of his parents’ divorce, perhaps he will feel more comfortable marrying you with a prenuptial agreement in place that legally protects him from the aspects of a potential divorce that worry him the most. 

Another compromise might be for you to set up your finances in a way that benefits one another, even without a marriage certificate. You can name one another as beneficiaries on your life insurance. Or, depending on your state and how long you’ve lived together, you could look into filing your taxes jointly as a common-law couple. If you are planning on making any big purchases in the immediate future, such as a vehicle or a house, get both of your names on the title to ensure your financial interests are protected in the event of a breakup. 

As you can see, there are plenty of options, but they all require honesty and flexibility. Trust one another with these vulnerabilities, and several “third ways” will reveal themselves.

Before I close my advice, as a wife of 14 years and a baby mama of 13, I feel obliged to raise one more point. Both of you need to ask yourself why sharing children seems like less of a commitment to you than marriage. The reality of marriage is that it’s as permanent as Sharpie on a whiteboard — finding rubbing alcohol may be a hassle, but it will wipe right off once you do. Sharing a child, however, is as permanent as a whole human life. Thus, it should only happen if you’re 100% sure this is something you will do well together, come what may, forever. Because ultimately, that’s what it’s going to take. 

Rooting for you,

For Love & Money

Looking for advice on how your savings, debt, or another financial challenge is affecting your relationships? Write to For Love & Money using this Google form.

Finding a financial advisor doesn’t have to be hard. SmartAsset’s free tool matches you with up to three fiduciary financial advisors that serve your area in minutes. Each advisor has been vetted by SmartAsset and is held to a fiduciary standard to act in your best interests. Start your search now.

A trader works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, New York, U.S., March 3, 2020.

Andrew Kelly/Reuters

• The S&P 500 will plunge 32% in 2025 as a recession finally hits the US economy, BCA Research predicts.
• The firm said the Fed will fail to prevent a recession as it takes its time cutting interest rates.
• Rising unemployment and constrained credit will curb consumer spending, worsening the downturn.

The stock market will crash 32% in 2025 as the Federal Reserve fails to prevent a recession, according to the most bearish strategist on Wall Street.

Peter Berezin, chief global strategist at BCA Research, said in a recent note that a recession will hit the US economy later this year or in early 2025, and the downturn will send the S&P 500 tumbling to 3,750.

“The consensus soft-landing narrative is wrong. The US will fall into a recession in late 2024 or early 2025. Growth in the rest of the world will also slow sharply,” Berezin said.

Part of Berezin’s bearish outlook is based on the idea that the Fed will “drag its feet” in cutting interest rates, and the central bank will only meaningfully loosen financial conditions until a recession is apparent.

By then, it will be too late.

Berezin highlighted that the labor market is weakening as job openings decline materially from their post-pandemic peak. An ongoing decline in the quits rate, hiring rate, and recent downward revisions to the April and May jobs report also point to a slowing labor market.

“Two years ago, workers who lost their jobs could simply walk across the street to find new work. That has become increasingly difficult,” Berezin said.

The June jobs report showed the unemployment rate ticking higher to 4.1% from 4.0%, yet another sign of some mild weakness in the jobs market.

Rising unemployment could ultimately lead to consumers reducing their spending to build up their “precautionary savings,” Berezin said, and that will happen as consumers’ ability to borrow money narrows due to rising delinquency rates.

Ultimately, a negative feedback loop will develop in the broader economy, which will send the stock market reeling.

“With little accumulated savings to draw on and credit availability becoming more constrained, many households will have little choice but to curb spending. Decreased spending will lead to less hiring. Rising unemployment will curb income growth, leading to less spending and even higher unemployment,” Berezin explained.

And perhaps most importantly, the Fed’s plan to blunt any economic decline via interest rate cuts simply won’t work.

“It is important to recognize that what matters for the economy is not the fed funds rate per se, but the interest rate that households and businesses actually pay,” Berezin said.

For example, the average mortgage rate paid by consumers is around 4%, compared to current mortgage rates of around 7%.

That means even if the Fed cuts interest rates and mortgage rates decline, the average mortgage rate paid by consumers will continue to rise.

That principal also applies to businesses and the loans they hope to refinance in the coming years.

“These dynamics will trigger more defaults, causing pain for the banking systems. The problems that affected regional banks last year have not gone away,” Berezin said.

A trader works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, New York, U.S., March 3, 2020.

Andrew Kelly/Reuters

• The S&P 500 will plunge 32% in 2025 as a recession finally hits the US economy, BCA Research predicts.
• The firm said the Fed will fail to prevent a recession as it takes its time cutting interest rates.
• Rising unemployment and constrained credit will curb consumer spending, worsening the downturn.

The stock market will crash 32% in 2025 as the Federal Reserve fails to prevent a recession, according to the most bearish strategist on Wall Street.

Peter Berezin, chief global strategist at BCA Research, said in a recent note that a recession will hit the US economy later this year or in early 2025, and the downturn will send the S&P 500 tumbling to 3,750.

“The consensus soft-landing narrative is wrong. The US will fall into a recession in late 2024 or early 2025. Growth in the rest of the world will also slow sharply,” Berezin said.

Part of Berezin’s bearish outlook is based on the idea that the Fed will “drag its feet” in cutting interest rates, and the central bank will only meaningfully loosen financial conditions until a recession is apparent.

By then, it will be too late.

Berezin highlighted that the labor market is weakening as job openings decline materially from their post-pandemic peak. An ongoing decline in the quits rate, hiring rate, and recent downward revisions to the April and May jobs report also point to a slowing labor market.

“Two years ago, workers who lost their jobs could simply walk across the street to find new work. That has become increasingly difficult,” Berezin said.

The June jobs report showed the unemployment rate ticking higher to 4.1% from 4.0%, yet another sign of some mild weakness in the jobs market.

Rising unemployment could ultimately lead to consumers reducing their spending to build up their “precautionary savings,” Berezin said, and that will happen as consumers’ ability to borrow money narrows due to rising delinquency rates.

Ultimately, a negative feedback loop will develop in the broader economy, which will send the stock market reeling.

“With little accumulated savings to draw on and credit availability becoming more constrained, many households will have little choice but to curb spending. Decreased spending will lead to less hiring. Rising unemployment will curb income growth, leading to less spending and even higher unemployment,” Berezin explained.

And perhaps most importantly, the Fed’s plan to blunt any economic decline via interest rate cuts simply won’t work.

“It is important to recognize that what matters for the economy is not the fed funds rate per se, but the interest rate that households and businesses actually pay,” Berezin said.

For example, the average mortgage rate paid by consumers is around 4%, compared to current mortgage rates of around 7%.

That means even if the Fed cuts interest rates and mortgage rates decline, the average mortgage rate paid by consumers will continue to rise.

That principal also applies to businesses and the loans they hope to refinance in the coming years.

“These dynamics will trigger more defaults, causing pain for the banking systems. The problems that affected regional banks last year have not gone away,” Berezin said.

He is not offering great reform, but his Wilson-like workaholism and Attlee-like seriousness are probably what we need now

• Geoffrey Robertson KC is head of Doughty Street Chambers

What does Keir Starmer actually stand for? Will our new prime minister turn out to be a socialist (as Tories claim), an authoritarian (as the left fears) or a closet liberal? His legal background may hold some clues.

After university he applied to join my chambers, 1 Dr Johnson’s Buildings, which was at the forefront of the civil liberties battles of the day. In many ways it was not an obvious choice for an aspiring Labour MP, headed by the Welsh Liberal QC MP Emlyn Hooson, who had defended the Moors murderers, and had among its members John “Rumpole” Mortimer, the liberal Tory Joe Walker-Smith, and myself, by then a veteran of anti-censorship cases such as Mary Whitehouse’s crusade against Gay News, and author of the cumbersomely titled textbook, Freedom, the Individual and the Law.

Continue reading…

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has found himself at the center of the storm as Democrats weigh the wisdom of keeping President Biden at the top of the ticket following his disastrous debate performance in Atlanta last month. 

The Democratic leader is being squeezed between two powerful but opposing forces. On one side is the predilection to rally behind his White House ally for the sake of party unity. On the other is the growing panic within his caucus that the president would be a drag on Democrats up and down the ballot, sinking the party’s chances of flipping control of the House in this year’s elections. 

Only five House Democrats have come out publicly so far to urge Biden to bow out and make room for another candidate to challenge former President Trump, the GOP’s presumptive nominee, in November. But that number is expected to grow in the days and weeks ahead — especially if polls continue to show that public confidence in Biden’s capacity to hold the office is waning in the wake of the debate.

The converging dynamics are thrusting Jeffries into a high-stakes decision, with all eyes in the House Democratic Caucus — and at the White House — waiting to see how the leader traverses the tricky path ahead.

“Hakeem is very thoughtful and very deliberate,” Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio), a front-line lawmaker, told The Hill. “He takes his time and that has served him well throughout this term in that he’s been able to get, with others, a deal to avoid default, a budget agreement and the national security and global aid package.”

“These aren’t small things, and they didn’t happen without his very deliberate, thoughtful leadership,” Landsman continued. “That’s how he approaches things, it’s how he’s approaching this, which is he takes time to listen to people.”

In the aftermath of the debate, alarmed Democrats voiced private reservations with keeping Biden at the top of the ticket, but most have held their tongues publicly — a reflection of their deference to, and respect for, Jeffries as he weighs the path forward. Some said the goal of winning the presidency should outweigh any allegiances to any one person.

“Our mission is to win the White House and to prevent Donald Trump from getting there,” said one lawmaker, who spoke anonymously to discuss a delicate topic. “We have to have a family conversation, basically.”

Many factors will go into that decision — not only the fitness concerns raised by Biden’s performance, but the effects of that performance on donors, voters and the front-line Democrats facing tough reelections in battleground districts that will decide which party controls the House next year. 

“You might start having guys that are like, ‘Man, we’ve got to put some distance between us and him,’” said another Democratic lawmaker. “For the realpolitik.”

Jeffries, for his part, has kept his cards close to the vest, fueling questions about how he will handle the sensitive situation.

The day after the debate, the top Democrat told reporters that Biden should not step aside. But when asked hours later if the president is the most effective communicator for the party, he appeared to leave the door open to replacing the president.

“Until he articulates a way forward in terms of his vision for America at this moment, I’m gonna reserve comment about anything relative to where we are at this moment other than to say I stand behind the ticket,” Jeffries said.

Jeffries tried to clean up the comments last weekend, telling MSNBC’s “The Weekend” that conversations are taking place “with various parts of the House Democratic Caucus.”

“That’s ongoing, that will continue,” he added.

Jeffries has spoken directly with Biden since the debate, a source familiar with the matter told The Hill, and he held a call with House Democratic leadership last week. His office did not respond to requests for comment Friday.

The decision is easily the most consequential of Jeffries’s young tenure as the leader of House Democrats — a perch he assumed just last year — with the potential to determine whether the party will keep the White House and flip control of the House, where Jeffries would be poised to become the first Black Speaker in the nation’s history. 

Yet it’s not the first major — nor highly unusual — decision of Jeffries’s leadership tenure. Already, he’s guided Democrats through two historic votes to remove a Speaker from power. In the first, he opted not to rescue former-Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) from a conservative coup, which sealed McCarthy’s fate as the first Speaker ever to be ousted. In the second, he joined most Democrats in protecting Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) from a similar revolt, ensuring that the Louisiana Republican would keep the gavel. 

In both cases, Jeffries approached the decision discreetly, withholding any final determinations — at least publicly — until he had a chance to huddle, in person, with House Democrats to gauge the temperature of his caucus. That’s led to speculation that Jeffries will follow the same playbook regarding Biden’s future, as well, as Democrats prepare to meet behind closed doors Tuesday morning in the Capitol — their first gathering since Biden’s debate debacle. 

The speculation swirling around Biden’s future is the biggest story in the country, and Landsman said it will be a focus of Tuesday’s meeting “for sure.” 

“How it’s set up, I’m not entirely sure how he’ll do that,” Landsman said, referring to Jeffries.

But as time goes on, pressure — from both sides of the highly charged debate — is continuing to mount around the top Democrat.

Biden, his campaign and the White House, on one hand, have been defiant that the president plans to remain in the race, swatting away at any notion that the incumbent is not up for another four years on the job.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Biden told attendees at the White House’s Fourth of July barbecue.

And a number of Biden’s congressional allies are firmly behind him in that decision. 

“I’m not in panic mode at this point. Very bad night on Thursday, I think everybody has universally acknowledged that already, including the president. But I don’t really feel that he’s incapable of governing, or anything along those lines,” Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) said last week by phone. “He still is the leader of the free world, and he’s doing a good job of it.”

At the same time, however, the chorus of Democrats calling on Biden to step aside is growing.

Three sitting House Democrats — Reps. Lloyd Doggett (Texas), Raúl Grijalva (Ariz.) and Seth Moulton (Mass.) — have publicly called on Biden to withdraw from the race, speaking for what sources tell The Hill is scores of lawmakers behind the scenes who feel the same way.

“This is the worst decision that the American people have had to make, probably in my lifetime,” Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) said, referencing a distaste for both Biden and Trump. 

“You can’t think about the top of the ticket. I’m running to represent my constituents. It’s about me,” Golden continued. “Could it have an effect on me? Sure. But I’ve already shown that I do my own thing. And no one’s voted against Biden more than I have.”

As House Democrats wait to hear from Jeffries, meanwhile, some are closely watching Biden to see if he can catapult back after his lackluster debate performance, a result that could make the Democratic leader’s decision easier. With that in mind, some are wondering why Biden has had so few public appearances since the debate.  

“It is time for Biden to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that he can prosecute this case against Trump, who is unfit to be president and who will upend our democracy in our lives,” Landsman said.

Asked if he has seen that since the debate, the Ohio Democrat responded: “No.”

“Has anyone? Has he tried?” he asked. “There were 40 million people watching the debate. It’s more than a rally and an interview.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will visit the US on July 9-11 to participate in the NATO summit in Washington