NYCB Ballooned Despite Real Estate Warnings in Years Before Fall




Max Abelson
Mon, March 4, 2024 

(Bloomberg) -- The mood was practically giddy when the heads of two regional banks hosted a town hall in the spring of 2021.

The industry’s long drought in mergers was ending, and two lenders below the public’s radar, New York Community Bancorp and Flagstar, were poised to become more formidable by joining forces.

“I look at it as a blank page,” NYCB’s Thomas Cangemi said. “I call it a Picasso that we’re going to paint together.”

Three years later, the lender known for catering to New York City landlords is in serious trouble. Last week, it revealed major weaknesses in its ability to monitor risks and replaced Cangemi as CEO with the second fiddle at that town hall, Flagstar’s Sandro DiNello. Investors are worried the new boss will set aside even more money to cover souring loans, on top of a $552 million hit that shocked the market in January. Credit raters have slashed it to junk and its shares have cratered 73% this year.

How NYCB got here is a tale of percolating financial risks, changing rules and shifting regulators. New rent restrictions became law in 2019, but instead of acknowledging a hit to its loan book, the bank got bigger. Back-to-back acquisitions, first Flagstar and then parts of Signature Bank, almost doubled the firm's size and set it on a collision course with new rules for banks holding more than $100 billion of assets.

The crash came this year. Amid regulatory pressure, NYCB bolstered reserves and shareholders unloaded its stock.

It's a story with broad implications: Legions of rivals are under pressure to merge so they can afford to make the jump from street-corner branch networks to tech-driven financial services. But it's a perilous moment for the industry. High interest rates and cracks in commercial real estate are eroding the value of assets on balance sheets. Depositors are able to pull cash faster than ever. Shareholders have learned to dump stocks at the first sign of serious trouble.

Indeed, NYCB was a stock-market darling before it announced plans in late January to horde cash.

“Everything was going well, and all of a sudden — bingo — you have a day like that,” said Michael Manzulli, once the chairman of the bank’s board. “And you go: ‘Wow.’”

Some longtime fans have remained loyal. After the bank bolstered reserves, Mark Hammond, who ran Flagstar through the financial crisis and is the son of its founder, was optimistic enough to snatch up NYCB’s hobbled stock. In an interview last month, he pooh-poohed the “paranoia” about real estate. Then last week’s disclosures sent the stock down an additional 43%.

Spokespeople for the bank didn’t respond to requests for comment. The firm has said that it doesn’t expect the weaknesses in its controls to result in changes to its allowance for credit losses. And commercial real estate veterans say that when loans do sour, lenders have broad latitude to work out solutions with borrowers. In early February, the company said depositors had entrusted more money to the bank this year.

NYCB started off small, before a former teller landed on a big strategy.

Six decades ago, Joseph Ficalora, the grandson of Sicilian immigrants, joined Queens County Savings Bank. Coming back from the Vietnam War, he didn’t take his father’s advice to get a union job in sanitation, instead enrolling in a management training program at the bank. He quickly climbed the ranks. By the time the firm changed its name to New York Community Bank in 2000, he’d already been running the place for years.

Ficarola’s strategy was straightforward. He bought rivals, preserved their identities to appeal to mom-and-pop depositors and loaned their savings to Manhattan real estate investors. His sweet spot was multifamily apartment buildings with rents controlled or stabilized. While tenants could be relied on to stick around and keep cash flowing, many landlords adopted a more lucrative approach, fixing up buildings to take advantage of rules allowing them to raise rents.

By 2004, he had cobbled together seven banks into the third-biggest thrift in the US. As it hit $23 billion of assets, up from $1.9 billion in three years, he could brag about watching 35 rival branches disappear from just one spot in Flushing.

NYCB was just getting started. It bought $11 billion of assets from the failed AmTrust Bank in 2009 and $2.2 billion of deposits from Aurora Bank in 2012. Yet a proposal to get even bigger by buying Astoria Bank fell apart in 2016, with analysts suggesting that regulators may have balked. That year, NYCB rewarded its boss handsomely with unusually lucrative perks.

Around that time, a Queens reporter asked Ficalora about the secret of his success, eliciting a quick answer: “Always be an asset to your boss, never a threat.” But in late 2020, the bank surprised investors by announcing Ficalora would be stepping down just three days later. Cangemi, the longtime chief financial officer, would replace him.

If there was any ill will, it didn’t show in a recent photo: Ficalora, who was named the Associazione Culturale Italiana di New York’s Man of the Year in 2018, stood smiling near his successor when Cangemi got the honor last year.

Cangemi took over a bank facing hurdles. In 2019, New York renters won sweeping new protections that stopped landlords from raising rents on regulated apartments. Owners were outraged, and their banks found themselves under pressure. NYCB’s loan portfolio was almost all mortgages, mostly multifamily, and most of those subject to New York rent rules.

The pandemic triggered more stress. When offices emptied and companies pared their square footage, it spelled yet more trouble for the industry's bankers.

But the pain didn’t show up right away. Despite predictions that the new rent rules would lead to losses for landlords and their lenders, NYCB’s level of troubled loans hovered near record lows in 2020 and 2021, perhaps helped by rock-bottom interest rates and the government’s pandemic response. Cangemi chalked it up to careful lending — its “unprecedented track record of strong asset quality, which goes back over 50 years.”

One person who worked on risk around that time, asking not to be identified discussing internal operations, said regulators had long harped on the bank’s concentration in multifamily lending. But the response wasn’t always receptive. An executive was so gruff with regulators during a meeting that a colleague held a sidebar with the officials to make sure they weren’t offended, the person said.

The lender has long taken pride in its track record. NYCB has bragged that aside from some ill-fated taxi medallion loans its average losses over the past three decades amount to about 0.04% of its loan book each year, while the figure is almost 20 times higher for rivals in a key index.

Without evident loan losses, Cangemi could focus on the itch to grow. He lamented at the town hall that getting hung up on an earlier transaction had left the firm in “a very difficult spot.”

Things loosened around the end of 2020, when Huntington Bancshares Inc., M&T Bank Corp. and Webster Financial Corp. unveiled plans to swallow rivals.

Cangemi and DiNello soon announced their deal, too. Flagstar was the Midwest’s biggest publicly owned savings bank and one of the country’s largest residential mortgage servicers, but its history wasn’t pretty.

It was founded by Tom Hammond, who’d moved to Detroit from Nebraska with fond memories of hitchhiking to bird havens with his uncased shotgun. He boasted of bagging most of the game available in Alaska, the mountains of Europe and the South Pacific.

Flagstar got bagged, too. The bank was pummeled so badly during the global financial crisis that it was rescued by private equity firm MatlinPatterson Global Advisers. In the years that followed, the bank scrambled to clean up its act.

Flagstar agreed in 2012 to pay $133 million to settle a US lawsuit accusing the bank of submitting false documents to insure ineligible loans. A year later the bank reached a deal to pay $110 million to settle accusations from MBIA Inc. that it falsely represented the quality of loans. A $121.5 million settlement with Fannie Mae followed, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered the bank to stop illegally blocking attempts by borrowers to save their homes.

“When I got there, the bank was a train wreck,” said David Wade, who joined in 2013 and left last year as a senior mortgage underwriter. “Things had just gotten so bad.”

But for 2021, DiNello could brag of “exceptionally successful” earnings. Things were so good that Wade and his colleagues didn’t understand the direction of the takeover when it was announced that April. “In fact, initially, a lot of us were thinking this was a Flagstar acquisition, not the other way around,” Wade said. “It was a while before we realized, well, those guys actually have more money than us.”

For years, community groups had pushed the banks and their regulators to support underserved tenants. Then, during the merger talks, something behind the scenes caught the groups’ attention.

In April 2022, the banks announced they’d want to operate under a national bank charter, meaning they’d no longer need to win approval from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development, a nonprofit founded in 1974, was suspicious.

“They were unable to secure the necessary approvals from their regulator at the FDIC, and are now going through another regulator in the hopes that they will be more favorable,” the group wrote to regulators a few months later. “How is NYCB able to do this?”

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency eventually approved the deal, with a condition: The right to approve dividends through this November.

Once the deal closed, it was quickly followed by another — a partial takeover of rival Signature after its collapse. Both fed NYCB new customers and sticky accounts. The moves also helped ease its reliance on multifamily lending, which fell to 46% in early 2023 from 55% at the end of the year.

Even so, the old headaches in Washington and New York hadn’t disappeared. Investors were trying to measure the impact of $2.7 trillion in commercial real estate loans held by US banks as values tumbled and borrowers stared down sky-high interest rates.

And the takeovers had catapulted NYCB’s assets past $100 billion, triggering more rigorous regulation. Federal watchdogs taking a look could see that the bank’s new peers had more capital and deeper reserves for souring losses. Its top risk and audit executives exited their posts quietly.

Read More: NYCB’s Talks With Watchdog Led to Moves That Rocked Market

NYCB shocked shareholders and analysts with a one-two punch on Jan. 31. Its provision for loan losses jumped 10 times more than expected as the bank flagged trouble with a pair of loans for a co-op and office space. It slashed its quarterly dividend 70%.

“It’s like when you have a car that you love and you sell it to somebody, and you see them a year later and they’ve just torn it all up and not taken care of it,” said Wade, the former senior mortgage underwriter.

A week later, Moody’s Investors Service cited governance challenges and financial risks when it cut its credit to junk. Last week, Moody’s cut it even further.

At the 2021 town hall, DiNello and his counterpart didn’t show much anxiety about the future. “We laugh about it,” Cangemi said, according to a transcript filed with regulators. “We’re not going to go backwards. We’re going to go forward.”

But DiNello had the last word. “We’ve got to take all of this talk, all this opportunity that we envision, and we got to make it happen,” he said. “We’re all going to look back on this in the next few years and we’re going to think: ‘Wow.’”

--With assistance from Hannah Levitt, Katanga Johnson, Bre Bradham, Diana Li, Jennifer Surane and Steve Dickson.

Former Twitter CEO sues Elon Musk

Amanda Silberling
Mon, March 4, 2024 

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Another day, another lawsuit involving Elon Musk. Four former Twitter executives, including ex-CEO Parag Agrawal, sued Musk on Monday, alleging that they're owed over $128 million in severance payments.

When Musk bought Twitter (now X), one of his very first moves as the company's owner was to fire Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and lawyers Sean Edgett and Vijaya Gadde. According to the lawsuit, Musk has a "special ire" toward these former executives, who worked hard to hold Musk to his $44 billion commitment when he tried to back out. The lawsuit quotes Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, which quotes Musk as saying he would "hunt every single one" of Twitter's C-suite "till the day they die."

Musk has been a vocal critic of Gadde in particular, who was involved in several high-profile content moderation decisions on Twitter. After putting in his bid to buy Twitter, he posted memes mocking the executive, which sparked a wave of racist online attacks against her.

It's not just these executives who haven't gotten their severance pay. Musk has faced several lawsuits from former Twitter employees who are also waiting for a check. Under Musk's ownership, the company has stopped paying rent on some of its offices, which has led to even more lawsuits and evictions.

According to the lawsuit, Musk claimed that these executives committed "gross negligence" and "willful misconduct" in their termination letters, but never was able to show evidence of his allegations.

"This is the Musk playbook: to keep the money he owes other people, and force them to sue him," the lawsuit reads. "Even in defeat, Musk can impose delay, hassle, and expense on others less able to afford it."


Twitter's former CEO and other execs are suing Elon Musk and X for $128 million in unpaid severance

The group says Musk “made up a fake cause” for their firing to avoid paying them.


Karissa Bell
·Senior Editor
Mon, March 4, 2024 


Anadolu via Getty Images

A group of former Twitter executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, are suing Elon Musk and X over millions of dollars in unpaid severance benefits. The claims date back to the chaotic circumstances surrounding Musk’s takeover of the company in October 2022.

When Musk took control of the company, his first move was to fire Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde and general counsel Sean Edgett. According to the lawsuit, Musk had “special ire” for the group because of the role they played in the months-long court battle that forced Musk to follow through with the acquisition after he attempted to back out of the deal. According to the lawsuit, Agrawal is entitled to $57.4 million in severance benefits, Segal is entitled to $44.5 million, Gadde $20 million and Edgett $6.8 million, for a total of about $128 million.

The lawsuit cites Musk biographer Walter Isaacson’s account of the events, which explains that Musk rushed to close the Twitter deal a day early so he could fire the executives “for cause” just before their final stock options were set to vest. According to Isaacson, Musk bragged that the legal maneuver saved him about $200 million.

“Musk doesn’t pay his bills, believes the rules don’t apply to him, and uses his wealth and power to run roughshod over anyone who disagrees with him,” the lawsuit states,“Because Musk decided he didn’t want to pay Plaintiffs’ severance benefits, he simply fired them without reason, then made up fake cause and appointed employees of his various companies to uphold his decision.”

X didn’t respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. Of note, it’s not the first time former Twitter employees have sued the company for failing to pay severance benefits. A separate lawsuit claimed Twitter owed former workers more than $500 million in unpaid severance. Agrawal, Segal and Gadde also previously sued the company over unpaid legal bills as a result of shareholder lawsuits and other investigations that resulted from Musk’s takeover,

Former Twitter execs sue Elon Musk for over $128 million in severance

Reuters
Updated Mon, March 4, 2024 

FILE PHOTO: Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk in Paris

(Reuters) -Four former top Twitter executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, have sued Elon Musk for over $128 million in combined unpaid severance, according to a lawsuit filed on Monday.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, is the latest in a series of legal challenges the billionaire faces after he acquired the social media company for $44 billion in October 2022 and later renamed it X.

The other plaintiffs are Ned Segal, Twitter's former chief financial officer; Vijaya Gadde, its former chief legal officer; and Sean Edgett, its former general counsel.

Mere minutes after Musk took control of Twitter, the former executives say they were fired and that Musk falsely accused them of misconduct and forced them out of Twitter after they sued the billionaire for attempting to renege on his offer to purchase the company.

Musk then denied the executives severance pay they had been promised for years before he acquired Twitter, according to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs say they each are owed one year's salary and hundreds of thousands of stock options.

"This is the Musk playbook: to keep the money he owes other people, and force them to sue him," the former executives said in the 39-page lawsuit.

X is already facing a pair of proposed class actions claiming it owes rank-and-file workers who were laid off after Musk's acquisition at least $500 million in severance, and a third lawsuit by six former senior managers making similar claims. X has denied wrongdoing.

The company has also been sued previously for failing to pay its former public relations firm, landlords, vendors and consultants.

X did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

(Reporting by Sourasis Bose in Bengaluru, Sheila Dang in Dallas and Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Aurora Ellis)

UK

Work experience placements must be reinvented, former education secretaries say


Eleanor Busby, 

PA Education Correspondent
Mon, 4 March 2024 


The traditional model of a fixed work experience placement for teenagers in the summer term needs to be reinvented, two former education secretaries have said.

Baroness Morgan of Cotes and Lord Blunkett, who were education secretaries in previous Conservative and Labour administrations, have called for work experience to not only be a “one-off event”.

Businesses should have an “ongoing” and “meaningful” relationship with secondary schools and colleges and they should move away from a “rigid view of two weeks of work experience”, the peers have said.

Conservative peer Lady Morgan, who served as education secretary for two years when David Cameron was Prime Minister, is now chair of The Careers and Enterprise Company.

Labour peer Lord Blunkett, who served as education secretary under Tony Blair, led Labour’s council of skills advisers and published a series of recommendations for the party in October 2022.

The pair, who will both give speeches at an event in the House of Lords on Tuesday to mark National Careers Week, have called on policymakers and sector leaders to look again at work experience.

The former education secretaries said: “Memories of bad work experience persist. The annual teenage procession of two weeks of tea-making at a local firm with little or no benefit to either party still colours our national discourse.

“People often remark that the only thing they learned from the process was what job they didn’t want. Less return on investment, more dead weight cost.”

They added: “Modern work experience has more purpose, is focused on those who face most barriers and helps young people build skills that they struggle to master in school. It stretches over a young person’s time in education, rather than solely a one-off event.”

Their comments come after a report about the careers landscape in England has been published by The Careers and Enterprise Company.

Based on the evidence in the report, Lady Morgan and Lord Blunkett said: “Young people – particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds – report they want more [work experience].

“They want to learn and practice skills like speaking and listening and want a greater focus on the practicalities of applications for jobs.

“For businesses, it’s about moving away from a rigid view of two weeks of work experience, which in itself has disappeared in too many secondary schools.

“Instead, there needs to be an ongoing, meaningful relationship with schools and colleges, capturing imaginations as soon as young people enter secondary school. This may not mean more time, but it will mean more impact.”

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said: “The call for a reinvention of work experience is laudable and it would certainly be a good thing to have more and better work experience opportunities. However, there are myriad practicalities involved.

“It can often be difficult to secure work experience placements at all, schools and colleges are already on their knees with the various expectations placed upon them, and money and resources are extremely tight because of more than a decade of government underfunding.

“A wholesale review of the curriculum is required to ensure that we are prioritising the right things and doing so in a way that is balanced and deliverable.”

A Department for Education (DfE) spokesperson said: “As the Careers and Enterprise Company found in their recent report, 96% of young people in secondary education had at least one employer encounter last year and the number of schools and colleges in England providing experiences of the workplace increased across the board.

“We know how vital work experience is to young people’s development, which is why we are funding CEC to support schools and colleges to provide high-quality experiences of workplaces through their Network of Careers Hubs and Enterprise Advisers and invested around £100 million to support delivery of high-quality careers advice and guidance to people of all ages.”

Jamie Dimon wants to see more teenagers landing $60K roles, with schools measured on student job occupancy instead of college admission rates

Eleanor Pringle
Mon, March 4, 2024

Tom Williams—CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images


In the work experience versus college experience debate, the former has won a powerful new advocate: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

The Harvard Business School alumnus said he wanted to see more of a focus in the education system on high school graduates landing jobs instead of being forced into further education.

Although Dimon paid his respect to America's "wonderful" universities in an interview released over the weekend, the billionaire Wall Street titan said more emphasis should be placed on how well schools support students who want to go straight into the world of work.

"If you look at kids they gotta be educated to get jobs. Too much focus in education has been on graduating college… It should be on jobs. I think the schools should be measured on, did the kids get out and get a good job?" Dimon told Indianapolis-based WISH-TV.

In the past few years approximately 60% of high school graduates have gone on to enroll in college—though that number dropped and then rose again since the COVID pandemic. And while landing a better-paid job after graduation is often cited as one of the motivators for attending college or university, anecdotal and data evidence suggest this may no longer be the case.

Gen Z, for example, is increasingly realizing the world of work isn't what they thought it was. Graduate Lohanny Santos recently went viral on TikTok for recounting her struggle to find a minimum-wage role with two degrees, while employers are increasingly turning to skills-based hiring.

And while Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows earnings tend to be higher once you've achieved a bachelor's degree, prospective students now also have to consider the cost of repaying crippling tuition loans.

Dimon pointed out that a 17-year-old bank teller could make $40,000 a year, adding: "And if you happen to have a family at 18 or whatever, you get $20,000 in medical benefit for your family. You can be a welder, you can be a coder, you could be cyber you could be automotive—all of those jobs are $40,000 to $60,000/$70,000 a year."

"Jobs, jobs, jobs," Dimon repeated. "There are a lot of efforts taking place around the country but I think we've fallen behind as a nation."
Education shakeup advocate

Dimon has long been an advocate of shaking up the education system to introduce a greater focus on skills, previously lauding Germany's apprenticeship scheme, for example.

And while the number of apprenticeship opportunities in America is growing—and is predicted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to continue to do so—the 600,000 individuals currently on such schemes are a drop in the ocean compared to millions of college undergraduates.

The price tag associated with high-calibre degrees is also going up—prompting some to wonder whether Ivy League qualifications are still worth the $90,000-a-year fees. While many experts told Fortune the value of such a degree warrants the eye-watering sum, individuals should be picky about which subjects they study if they want to go on to earn six-figure salaries.

Dimon's future of work

The banking boss, who was paid a record $36 million for his work at America's biggest bank in 2023, believes not only that the route to a career will change, but also that the nature of work will shift.

A cautious advocate of the benefits of AI, Dimon said last year he believes the technology will allow staff of the future to work 3.5 days a week instead of the traditional five.

“People have to take a deep breath,” Dimon told Bloomberg TV. “Technology has always replaced jobs. Your children are going to live to 100 and not have cancer because of technology, and literally they’ll probably be working three and a half days a week.”

The technology—which has allowed for the creation of services such as OpenAI's ChatGPT—may be utilized by JPMorgan for a vast range of areas, Dimon added in the interview: errors, trading, research, and hedging to name a few—arguably illustrating fears that AI will take the jobs of human counterparts.

And while the billionaire boss of the New York–based bank also noted some employees’ lives will be disrupted by the technology displacing their roles, he said in JPMorgan Chase’s case at least, he hopes to “redeploy” any staff who are pushed out of a job by the tech.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A list of mass GUN killings in the United States this year

Mon, March 4, 2024 



The latest mass killing in the U.S. happened Sunday in King City in central California, where police said a group of men in masks opened fire at an outdoor party, killing four people and wounding seven others.

Police said they responded to a reported shooting and found three men with gunshot wounds who were pronounced dead in a front yard. A woman also died after someone took her to an area hospital, about 106 miles (170 kilometers) south of San Jose.

Several people were at the party outside a home when three men with dark masks and clothes got out of a silver car and fired at the group. The suspects then fled in the car. The investigation is ongoing, police said.

King City is a community of about 14,000 people in southern Salinas Valley farm country on the inland side of coastal mountains. The U.S. Army’s Fort Hunter Liggett training center sprawls nearby. The city is also known as a gateway to Pinnacles National Park.

This was the country’s 10th mass killing this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.

At least 47 people have died this year in those killings, which are defined as incidents in which four or more people die within a 24-hour period, not including the killer — the same definition used by the FBI.

The nation is witnessing the third-highest number on record of deaths due to mass killings by this point in a single year. Only 2023 and 2008 had more, with 57 deaths each by this point. Last year ended with 42 mass killings and 217 deaths, making it one of the deadliest years on record.

As of Monday, 584 mass killings have occurred since 2006, in which 3,036 people died and 2,047 people were injured, according to the database.

A look at other U.S. mass killings this year:

FERGUSON, MISSOURI: Feb. 19

Authorities said a 39-year-old woman intentionally set a fire at home to kill herself and her four children, ages 2, 5, 9 and 9. Investigators believe the mother set fire to a mattress, and a note was left stating her intentions to kill herself and her children, police said. Responding firefighters found the home engulfed in flames Neighbors had tried to save the family, but the fire was too intense.

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA: Feb. 16

Officials said four men were killed in a drive-by shooting in a neighborhood. Dozens of shots were fired outside a Birmingham home, police said. A group had been standing outside of a house as people got their cars washed when someone drove by and opened fire. No arrests were immediately reported.

HUNTINGTON PARK, CALIFORNIA: Feb. 11

Shootings over several hours left four people dead: a man in Bell, a man in a Los Angeles shopping center parking lot, a 14-year-old boy in Cudahy, and a homeless man in Huntington Park, authorities said. At least one other juvenile was wounded. Two suspected gang members were arrested in connection with the shootings, authorities said.

EAST LANSDOWNE, PENNSYLVANIA: Feb. 7

Six sets of human remains were recovered from the ashes of a fire that destroyed a home about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from Philadelphia, according to the county district attorney’s office. Authorities suspect the family members who died — including three children — were killed by a 43-year-old male relative who also died after shooting and wounding two police officers, the office added. A motive was not immediately identified.

EL MIRAGE, CALIFORNIA: Jan. 23

Authorities found the bodies of six men in the Mojave Desert outside the sparsely populated community of El Mirage after someone called 911 and said he had been shot, according to sheriff’s officials. The men were likely shot to death in a dispute over marijuana, local authorities said. The bodies were found about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northeast of Los Angeles in an area known for illegal cannabis operations. Five men were arrested and charged with murder.

JOLIET, ILLINOIS: Jan. 21

Authorities said a 23-year-old man shot eight people — including seven of his relatives — and injuring a ninth person in a Chicago suburb. He fatally shot himself later during a confrontation with law enforcement in Texas. Authorities believe he was trying to reach Mexico. Police said the victims included his mother, siblings, aunt, uncle and two men he might not have known. They were found in two homes, outside an apartment building and on a residential street.

TINLEY PARK, ILLINOIS: Jan. 21

A 63-year-old man in suburban Chicago killed his wife and three adult daughters a domestic-related shooting, police said. The man allegedly shot the four family members — ages 53, 24 and two 25-year-old twins — after an argument at their home. He was charged with four counts of first-degree murder.

RICHMOND, TEXAS: Jan. 13

A 46-year-old man fatally shot his estranged wife and three other relatives, including his 8-year-old niece, at a home in suburban Houston before killing himself, authorities said. The man opened fire at the home just before 7 a.m. that Saturday after returning his young child from a visit. Authorities said that after arriving at the home, he told his estranged wife that he wanted to reunite, but she refused. In addition to killing his niece and estranged wife, he also killed her brother and sister, ages 43 and 46.

REEDLEY, CALIFORNIA: Jan. 6

A 17-year-old boy was charged with killing four members of a neighboring family in central California. He lived next door to the victims — ages 81, 61, 44 and 43 — in Reedley, a small town near Fresno. Three bodies were found in the backyard of their home, including one buried in a shallow grave, police said. One body was found in the detached garage of the teenager’s home, police said.

The Associated Press

Lord Rothschild obituary

Stephen Bates
Mon, 4 March 2024

  THE GUARDIAN

Jacob Rothschild in the Smoking Room at Waddesdon Manor, his family’s ancestral home in Buckinghamshire, 2019.Photograph: Country Life/Future Publishing/Getty Images

Jacob Rothschild, Lord Rothschild, who has died aged 87, combined a ruthlessly successful business career, following in the family tradition as a financier in the City of London, with philanthropic projects. These mainly centred on the arts and heritage, including the restoration of the dynasty’s enormous 19th-century replica of a French chateau Waddesdon, in the middle of the Buckinghamshire countryside.

Although he claimed that for a lot of his life he had lived without luxury – true up to a point following the acrimonious breakup of his parents’ marriage when he was nine – he had a gilded entrance into the family bank, and by last year his wealth, built on shrewd investments and an inheritance, was estimated to be worth at least £825m. He protested to an interviewer that he certainly knew how to open a tin of baked beans, but his portfolio also included the Eythrope estate next to Waddesdon, a share of a vineyard in France, a villa and 30-acre estate on Corfu and a house in Knightsbridge, London.

He told the Sunday Times in 2012: “Look, we are not as wealthy as families who live abroad and pay no tax and we are believers in the Great Society. I have spent a large part of my life keeping things going.” He even expressed sympathy for the Occupy movement in the same interview: “You can’t tolerate a society where youth unemployment goes into the high 20%.”


The family’s wealth was built up over two centuries, from when Nathan Rothschild was sent from Frankfurt in 1798 to buy Manchester cotton textiles and stayed to set up a counting house in the City of London. It was so successful that it would underwrite the cost of the British army’s campaign at Waterloo and later the purchase of the Suez canal, resulting in a peerage for Jacob’s great-grandfather, another Nathan.

Born in Cambridge, Jacob was the son of the zoologist, wartime counter-espionage officer and later Downing Street thinktank head Victor Rothschild and his first wife, the artist Barbara Hutchinson, who was involved with the Bloomsbury set. After the marriage broke down, Victor took out his annoyance on Jacob and his sisters Sarah and Miranda. Jacob suffered a bout of polio and emerged as a diffident, quietly spoken but strong-willed adult. He was educated at Eton and studied history at Christ Church, Oxford, emerging with a first-class degree before undertaking national service in the Life Guards.

Instead of the academic career that he might have had, he joined the family firm, the merchant bank NM Rothschild, in 1963, after basic training with other City firms to learn the ropes. In coming years he pressed for the bank to become more adventurous and competitive: “a bank of brains” in seeking and making deals, such as he masterminded in gaining the contract to finance the Trans-Alpine pipeline in the mid-1960s and arranging Grand Metropolitan’s takeover of the brewers Watney Mann (1972).

But when the chairmanship of the bank became vacant in 1976 his father championed his staid older cousin, Evelyn, and Jacob took over the running of the bank’s small investment trust instead. He built it up from a capitalisation of £5m to one with assets of more than £3bn, the largest such trust in Britain by the time he retired in 2019. Not all his deals came off: the attempted Guinness bid for Distillers in 1986 failed spectacularly – though he personally was exonerated of boosting Guinness’s value to assure the takeover. A £13bn attempt to win control of British American Tobacco in partnership with Sir James Goldsmith and the Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer in 1989 also failed.

By the late 70s he had bitterly fallen out with Evelyn, sold up his shares in the bank and took the investment trust independent with a new name, J Rothschild Holdings, and a new headquarters in St James’s, where it continued to make deals, eclipsing the bank and benefiting eventually from the privatisation programme of Margaret Thatcher’s government.

Among the companies and acquisitions he bought into were plantations in Asia, property in Paris, the Paypoint electronic system, the Economist magazine and Coats Viyella textiles. In 1988 the company split into St James’s Place Capital and RIT Capital Partners. RIT took a lease on Spencer House, the ancestral London home of Princess Diana’s family, overlooking Green Park, and renovated the property.

In 1990 Jacob succeeded to the peerage on the death of his father (who left him only an ink stand in his will). The previous year his cousin, Dollie de Rothschild, had left him her £90m fortune and by then he had also assumed control of the Rothschild Foundation, which runs Waddesdon Manor, the house having been bequeathed to the National Trust in 1957.

Rothschild’s cultural philanthropy had been evident for years: Goldsmith said: “It depends which day it is: on one Jacob is an excellent banker, the next he is absorbed by art and heritage.” He himself said he read art catalogues like others read comics, and he was an enthusiastic collector, starting with a Giacometti artwork at the age of 22. He chaired the National Gallery trustees for six years from 1985, commissioning new architects to build the gallery’s extension after Prince Charles criticised the original design as being a monstrous carbuncle. Later he would chair the National Heritage Memorial Fund (1992-98) and the Heritage Lottery Fund (1995-98), enabling the renovation and opening up of Somerset House in central London.

A member of the Reform Jewish synagogue and president of the Institute of Jewish Affairs, Rothschild also inherited the family’s Israel charity, Yad Hanadiv, which has funded the building of the Knesset, the Israeli supreme court and national library as well as educational projects for Jewish and Arab children. He was knighted in 1998 and four years later appointed to the Order of Merit.

In 1969 he married Serena Dunn. She died in 2019, and he is survived by their four children, Nathaniel, Hannah, Beth and Emily.

• Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild, Lord Rothschild, born 29 April 1936; died 26 February 2024

‘It’s all fallen flat’: UK households earning more than £60,000 (CDN$103,350.25 ) 

on how they are struggling financially


Jedidajah Otte
Mon, 4 March 2024 


Despite incomes higher than the national average, some well-paid people say they are unable to fund a reasonable lifestyle.

Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

An annual gross income of £74,000 puts Scott, 28, a software engineer from Leicestershire, in the top 10% of earners nationally. But, he says, it doesn’t feel that way for him and his family.

“Ten years ago we’d have been laughing with my salary. Now, it feels like our heads are barely above water. There’s an attitude that at this level of income you’ve plenty of money, but it’s not true at all,” he says.

The couple’s mortgage uses up more than a third of Scott’s take-home pay, the family’s monthly grocery shop costs more than £500, his student loan repayments are £300 – “money I now desperately need,” he says.

Related: UK middle classes ‘struggling despite incomes of up to £60,000 a year’

“We lease a car, the cost of which has risen greatly too because of higher interest rates. After all the things I have to pay for, we’re lucky to have £300 left over for the month, which is quickly depleted by day-to-day expenses. It feels like we’ve done everything we were told to do and yet we’re still struggling,” Scott says.

“I worked hard at university to gain a valuable degree, I job-hopped to drastically increase my salary – but it’s not enough. I’ve considered reducing my pension contribution just so we can have more money.

“My wife, who had stopped working to care for our two children, both under five, has been looking for work for a few months, but the kind of work she needs just doesn’t exist – remote flexitime. We’ve actually considered moving to a different country because this one feels set up against families and young people.”

He believes taxation has become punitively high: “I pay almost £2,000 a month in taxes, which I can’t actually afford.” The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is under pressure from voters such as Scott and many in his own party to use Wednesday’s budget to announce personal tax cuts, most likely to either national insurance contributions or the basic rate of income tax. But the chancellor’s scope for such a move has been restricted in recent days by tighter than expected forecasts, as well as warnings that public services cannot survive further austerity to pay for pre-election giveaways.

Scott has been left feeling pessimistic about the future: “I don’t see an end to any of this: life isn’t going to get cheaper and I’ve pretty much maxed out my earning potential. It’s ridiculous and I’m so sick of it.

“We can’t afford holidays. We can’t afford to put money away for the kids. We can’t afford new things, gadgets, hobbies. What’s it all for?”

Scott was just one of scores of middle-class earners who shared with the Guardian how they are struggling to cope financially and can no longer afford comfortable living standards despite having household incomes of between £60,000 and £120,000.

A report last month from the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust highlighted how Britain’s insecure jobs market and high housing costs are leading to the growth of a precarious middle class. These households are struggling to maintain a decent living standard on joint incomes as high as £60,000 a year. That compares with the median gross annual earnings for full-time employees of £34,963 last April.

Many readers who got in touch earn significantly more than this, but say they are still struggling to afford their bills and decent living standards due to rocketing mortgage, rental and childcare costs, higher household bills and the highest tax burden in 70 years.

Parents and single people in particular argue their relatively high incomes are not sufficient to fund a reasonable lifestyle while taxes are so high. Among them is Chloe, 38, who owns her own home with an £180,000 mortgage outstanding and earns £57,500 a year in a senior role a charity in Sheffield.

“Over the past six to eight months I’ve really found myself struggling to make ends meet while also not living a life completely devoid of any pleasure,” she says.

To save money, Chloe says, she has stopped drinking, eating takeaways and buying new clothes, as well as downgrading both her and her dog’s food. “I’ve also borrowed money from my parents, who were concerned by how little I was putting the heating on in my property and were worried it would cause damp.”

Chloe, who is single, says she worries about not being able to afford having children, and a social life. Her current contract comes to an end in six months. “I’m very limited in what I can do socially and couldn’t afford to go even one month without working. It’s so frustrating when you hear the government say: ‘You can work your way out of poverty.’

“Work is not an answer when you’re taxing people at such a high level. I definitely think that the tax brackets should be reconsidered.”

Matt, 32, who works in housing policy, says his and his partner’s combined household income is about £80,000 a year. “We live just outside Newcastle upon Tyne and aren’t struggling, but I know that’s because we are – and I hate the term – Dinks: double income, no kids, and living in a part of the country where costs are relatively lower.

“It does seem that the only way to be on a middle income and doing OK at the moment is to be a Dink and living in the north.”

Rose, 35, a thinktank project manager from south London and mother-of-one, strongly agrees. She earns £34,000 a year, her partner, who works in IT, makes £57,000.

“The cost of living crisis is forcing us to move outside London,” Rose says. “After our son was born we moved to a two-bedroom flat in June 2022, paying £1,500. Our landlord increased the rent to £1,700 last May. We have not been going out since 2022. No dinners, Sunday roasts, or cinema.”

Going on maternity leave, Rose says, pushed her into debt she is now repaying. Her son’s nursery bill, £1,200 a month for four days, became unaffordable when the rent went up. “He’s now in nursery only two days a week at £750 a month, and stays with me the rest of the time while I work compressed hours. Although my partner and I both work full-time, we basically earn to pay rent, utility bills, debt and childcare.”

Although respondents with children reported more precarious finances than those without, millennial childless couples say they barely have any disposable income either.

Lillian, 36, from County Durham, an environmental consultant in the corporate sector says that despite her and her partner’s combined income of £70,000, they are experiencing substantial difficulties, as their doer-upper property has required repairs costing £25,000 so far.

“We just feel caught in the middle,” she says. “We find ourselves surviving from paycheck to paycheck, have no savings except pensions. We’ve worked hard, done everything we can to build ourselves up financially, have professional careers, but it’s all fallen flat.”

While the couple was fortunate to get a five-year fixed-rate mortgage in the pandemic at only 2%, they are dreading the cost increase when they will have to renew it next year now that the Bank of England base rate has soared to 5.25%.

Lillian fears having to work into her 80s. “The Tories have done a lot to erode the benefits of working, from Brexit to interest rates, but I don’t know that I trust any party to improve that. We definitely need a lot more public spending, but it cannot come from my income bracket; we’re completely squeezed.”

Lillian believes it should be people such as Lee, 47, a father of four from Surrey who works in tech, who should pay more taxes. Earning about £110,000, he is in the top 2% of earners. “I earn more than I ever did before now and feel very privileged,” he says. “And yet, I feel much poorer now than I did six or seven years ago, when I was only on £50,000, which is crazy.”

His wife works part-time as a childminder earning about £700 a month as they cannot afford childcare, Lee says. Like many other respondents, Lee believes in paying taxes, but feels resentful given the state of public services.

“Nothing works. You think – where is all this money going? Nothing is getting better. Something’s gotta change.

“It’s weird when papers describe the rich and I think – ‘is it people like me?’ I feel jealous of other people when they go on holiday, we can’t afford that. I shop at Aldi, we budget £1,000 a month for food and petrol for our 10-year-old car. We occasionally go to Wetherspoon’s for breakfast. I often think: ‘Is this it?’”

GREEN CAPITALI$M

Jamie Dimon takes a stand by signing JPMorgan up as the first big bank to reveal a key clean energy metric to investors

Amanda Gerut
Mon, March 4, 2024 a

Cyril Marcilhacy/Bloomberg-Getty Images

The dean of Wall Street CEOs is green. JPMorgan Chase today struck an agreement with three New York City pension funds with investments in the bank valued at $478 million to disclose the ratio of its clean energy to fossil fuel financing. According to the NYC funds, the metric will give investors a more comprehensive view as to how the bank is progressing on its net-zero emissions goals and whether it is ratcheting up its clean-energy financing activities over time.

JPMorgan’s settlement with the three NYC funds, which manage a combined $193 billion in assets, will result in the withdrawal of their shareholder proposal, which they have levied against six major banks. It makes JPMorgan the first of these banks to strike a deal with investors. The others—Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Royal Bank of Canada—still have proposals pending and the NYC Comptroller’s office has been engaging with them. The pension funds in January announced that they were launching the drive to prod the banks to offer up more data on their climate transition commitments.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance research found that in order for average global temperature increases to remain below 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is optimum, the ratio of investments in low-carbon energy to fossil fuels needs to reach a minimum of 4 to 1 by 2030. From there, the ratio needs to increase to 6 to 10 in the subsequent decade, and 10 to 1 afterward. In 2021, Bloomberg research found that for every dollar spent supporting fossil fuels, 0.8 supported low-carbon energy. JPMorgan’s estimated ratio was 0.7.

A JPMorgan spokesperson said it would take time to figure out how best to disclose the metric investors are asking for.

“We found common ground with the NYC Comptroller on disclosing a clean energy financing ratio with an understanding that it is going to take us some time and resources to develop a decision useful approach,” said a spokesperson in a statement to Fortune. “We will engage with NYC and our shareholders to provide the market more clarity and transparency about our activities and what financing the transition truly looks like.”

The bank in 2021 announced a $1 trillion target to finance initiatives to help foster the transition to a low-carbon economy. However, the funds pointed out in their proposal that JPMorgan offers more financing to fossil fuels than other banks, ponying up $434 billion since 2016, despite a commitment to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, said the NYC funds.

The move comes just weeks after J.P. Morgan Asset Management and State Street were roundly criticized for leaving the Climate Action 100+, a coalition of investors focused on working collaboratively to target the companies that are also the heaviest emitters of greenhouse gasses. Since then, Pacific Investment Management Company (Pimco) announced that it would also depart the group, bringing the total assets under management that have departed to $19 trillion. (BlackRock shifted its participation in C100+ to BlackRock International.)

The asset management firms pointed to their independence in withdrawing from C100+, noting that the group was previously focused on agitating for clearer disclosure and not seeking specific action from. That strategy is set to change with the second phase strategy this year. It also coincides with a movement toward anti-ESG proposals and rhetoric that have led conservative groups and politicians to criticize financial services firms for catering to “wokeness” to the detriment of financial returns.

A Climate Action spokesperson told Fortune that antitrust laws aren’t meant to stop investors or companies from working together on goals found not to be anti-competitive “that they have each independently decided is in their interest.”

The group cited an analysis from the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment that found that antitrust law was having a chilling effect on “necessary private-sector action to address climate and other sustainability-related challenges.”

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that BlackRock has abandoned the term “ESG” from its public statements and that CEO Larry Fink isn’t using it in his annual letters anymore. Instead, “transition investing” is the new work-around for talking about ESG, the Journal reported.

Still, regardless of the words companies use to discuss it, investors—particularly pension funds—remain focused on climate-change risk and engaging with companies on their net-zero commitments. In 2023, there were a record 643 environmental or social related shareholder proposals filed at public companies, a high-water mark that is expected to persist in 2024, according to a report from investor advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services.

Climate change-related issues are expected to generate the most proposals from shareholders to companies, the ISS report found, and some investors are asking financial services firms to report any misalignment between client greenhouse gas emissions and 2030 net-zero targets.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Aviva returns to Lloyd’s of London as climate change boosts insurance demand


Michael Bow
Mon, 4 March 2024 


Since taking the helm in July 2020, Dame Amanda Blanc has streamlined Aviva by selling eight non-core businesses and recouping around £8bn - Anna Gordon/EyeVine

Aviva is returning to Lloyd’s of London for the first time in more than two decades as threats such as climate change and cybercrime boost demand for speciality insurance.

The insurance giant has agreed to buy Lloyd’s insurance platform Probitas for £242m, giving it a lucrative foothold in the booming commercial insurance sector.

Founded in 1688, Lloyd’s is the world’s largest and oldest insurance hub – boasting a network of more than 380 brokers and 77 underwriting syndicates.


Probitas is a speciality property and casualty insurer and also offers insurance in emerging sectors such as renewables.

Though small, the takeover will allow Aviva to diversify away from home and motor insurance products, and gain exposure to higher margins and faster growth.

“This acquisition is another step in our strategy to invest in Aviva’s future profitable growth,” said Aviva chief executive Dame Amanda Blanc.

“Aviva’s presence in the Lloyd’s market opens up new opportunities to accelerate growth in our capital-light General Insurance business.”

The takeover marks Aviva’s return to the London market for the first time since the turn of the millennium.

Lloyd's boasts a network of more than 380 brokers and 77 underwriting syndicates - Eddie Mulholland

Aviva, then known as Norwich Union, quit Lloyd’s in 2000 after selling Marlborough Underwriting Agency to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

The 2000 exit coincided with a merger between Norwich Union and CGU, which created Aviva.

Aviva is planning to retain the Probitas branding and management team once the deal is completed later this year.

Probitas, which is 49.9pc owned by Saudi Arabian insurer Saudi RE, has been in sale talks with the FTSE 100 group for more than a year.

Aviva had reportedly been considering creating a Lloyd’s start-up but it has now decided to acquire a business off the shelf.

Probitas chief executive Ash Bathia said linking up with Aviva would help build “one of the most successful and profitable franchises in the Lloyd’s market”.

The Probitas acquisition also marks part of a broader shift by Dame Amanda to diversify Aviva away from traditional consumer products like car insurance.

Since taking the helm in July 2020, she has streamlined Aviva by selling eight non-core businesses and recouping around £8bn – £5bn of which has been returned to shareholders.

Probitas joins a number of other bolt-on acquisitions for Aviva, including Succession Wealth and AIG’s UK protection business.

The strategy has pleased long-suffering shareholders, who suffered years of dismal performance under former chief executives Andrew Moss, Mark Wilson and Maurice Tulloch.

Shares have risen 60pc since Dame Amanda took over.

Her decision to trim Aviva’s sprawling empire also saw off activist shareholder Cevian Capital, which exited its stake last year.

Probitas is set to join Aviva’s global corporate and speciality division, which already provides commercial insurance.

The Lloyd’s deal will add an extra distribution channel, and other opportunities to grow the division.

The latest acquisition won the support of City analysts, who said Aviva had struck the £242m deal at the right time.

“Lloyd’s is a good market to be in,” said Abid Hussain, an insurance analyst from Panmure Gordon. “We are going to see pricing power coming through to prime insurers and it diversifies Aviva away from their other lines of business. It ticks all the boxes.”

Analysts at Bank of America also hailed the deal, saying Probitas’ business “aligned with Aviva’s existing operations” stretching across the UK, Ireland and Canada.

The fresh foray into the Lloyd’s market will help Aviva tap into a recent boom in Leadenhall Street.

Rising risks like climate change and cyber threats have triggered a surge in large global companies buying ever more complex insurance products, driving up premiums and margins.

Lloyd’s chief executive John Neal has predicted Lloyd’s current underwriting figures of £47bn could double over the next decade due to demand wrought by climate change and cyber attacks.

“The Lloyd’s market is quite different now than it was 20 years ago,” said Mr Hussain from Panmure Gordon. “It runs in cycles and has entered a favourable underwriting cycle so from a timing perspective it’s a good entry point.”

Around 60pc of Probitas’s book is property and casualty insurance, with finance, construction and cyber also key to its offering, meaning it is exposed to the rising tide of specialist demand at Lloyd’s.

Lloyd’s observers say the underwriter is a relatively small player in the market, meaning Aviva is dipping its toe in the water rather than wading in.

“This isn’t like the Man City takeover, and materially changing the Premier League,” said one industry observer. “What they are not intending is for it to be a game changer.”

What’s behind the UK’s increase in autism diagnoses?

Amelia Hill
Mon, 4 March 2024 

Research suggests the total autistic population in England and Wales exceeds 1.2 million.
Photograph: Jessie Casson/Getty Images

Autism is a condition in a state of slow flux. In 2021, a study found a 787% rise in the number of diagnoses between 1998 and 2018 in the UK.

Increases in diagnoses have been a feature of autism for almost as long as it has been a recognised condition: 80 years ago, autism was thought to affect one in 2,500 children. That has gradually increased and now one in 36 children are believed to have autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

This exponential rise is partly due to greater awareness and deeper understanding of the condition, as well as more clinicians who can make the diagnosis. That has led to what one expert has called autism’s “ever-wider assessment boundaries – boundaries that are still moving outwards”.

Those boundaries encompass a wide range of people for whom autism would never have been considered as a possible diagnosis, especially women and girls. The consequent awareness has led to large numbers of adults seeking medical referrals to explain differences they may have been aware of since childhood.

But other factors behind the increase remain controversial, with those in the neurodiversity movement and experts undecided as to whether the increase is also due to overdiagnosis or whether more children have the condition.

The author of the 2021 study says the boundaries of diagnoses may expand further. Prof Ginny Russell, at the University of Exeter, said: “I do think it’s going to continue until maybe everyone is categorised as neurodiverse.”

Russell said while there could be an argument for there being a marginally higher proportion than previously of children with autistic traits who have low support needs, there was “no plausible reason” to support an argument that autism cases had increased substantially.

“What’s happened is that diagnoses have increased because of ever-wider assessment boundaries – boundaries that are still moving outwards,” she said. “Some go as far as to suggest that people diagnosed with autism today are united merely by not fitting their social environment.

“It may soon encompass people like me, for example. I have not changed but having some borderline autistic traits, I may soon be absorbed by autism – because it is itself changing.”

Russell is not alone in noting the huge rise in diagnoses. “When I started in this field in the 1980s, autism was considered quite rare,” said Prof Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the Autism Research Centre. “But there’s been a massive shift in the last couple of decades, during which the increase in diagnoses has been exponential.”

Autism is a set of conditions which contains a wide-ranging spectrum of disabilities. And there has been a 50% increase in the number of patients with an open referral for suspected autism in England in the past 12 months.

But there are those who say that even this increase is not accurate: other research suggests the total autistic population in England and Wales exceeds 1.2 million – almost double the figure of 700,000 cited by the government for the entirety of the UK. This would be the case if the rate of diagnosis matched those for under-19s across all ages, the study says.

Elizabeth O’Nions, the lead researcher of the study, said autism was still under-recognised in adults, with more than 90% of all autistic people aged over 50 in England possibly undiagnosed.

But Dr Peter Carpenter, the chair of the Neurodevelopmental Psychiatry Special Interest Group, questioned this and pointed out that adult diagnostic services did not necessarily have the expertise necessary to review the adult population against modern criteria. “We probably do not have a realistic idea of what a ‘typical autistic 50-year-old’ looks like,” he said.

There have also been changes when it comes to understanding autism among those with learning disabilities: in the 1980s, it was thought that only a quarter of those with learning disabilities had autism. Now the NHS acknowledges that it could be as high as three-quarters. “That’s an incredibly steep rise,” said Baron-Cohen.

Another increase in autism numbers is due to the removal of Asperger syndrome as a diagnosis. Created in 1994, the label was officially “retired” in 2013, with the condition subsumed under the umbrella term of autism.

A further important moment of change was the neurodiversity movement of the late 1990s, which drove through huge changes in identification, fighting stigma and redefining autism as an identity rather than a disease. All this has led to what Russell calls the “loop”.

“A rise in diagnoses loops backs to increased awareness, which impacts on how people identify themselves, which leads to a call for more assessment centres, which has led to a greater rise in diagnoses,” she said.

“As awareness and diagnoses increase, those with less severe symptoms come forward with their own stories of how autism affects them. The diagnostic criteria is widened to take these accounts onboard, which loops back again to another increase in diagnoses.”

In short, there is no clear answer as to what autism is – or is not. Some say there never will be.

William Mandy, a professor of neurodevelopmental conditions at University College London, believes the nebulous nature of autism is a defining feature of the condition.

He said: “What are the traits that we need to have before we are going to label someone as autistic?. That’s such an impossible question to answer that I think we should have a numerical cut-off point – maybe we should just say 2% of the population is autistic.”

The one thing that matters even more than the profound questions around autism diagnoses is the sad truth that autistic people too often do not lead happy lives. Compared with non-autistic people, they are about 70-80% more likely to have poor mental and physical health, experience educational under-attainment, unemployment and underemployment, victimisation, social isolation and premature mortality.

The NHS is doing its best but there has been a 350% rise in children waiting for an autism assessment since the height of the Covid pandemic, with waiting times exceeding two years.

Child and adolescent mental health services (Camhs) are at breaking point: 80% of child mental health referrals are autism-related in some areas of the UK. Some NHS commissioners have introduced new referral criteria to try cut lists in a move that parents say puts children at risk of harm, including suicide.

This has led to some asking whether the main objective of autism research should be refocused to understand how to help autistic people lead happier lives.

Mandy said: “We are currently very focused on making a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ distinction in terms of diagnoses. But why not say, ‘Somebody has these traits. How might that be affecting their life and what we can do to help?’”

Some NHS centres twice as likely to diagnose adults as autistic, study finds


Amelia Hill
Mon, 4 March 2024 

A professor who led the research said it raised fears that lives could be badly affected by inaccurate diagnoses.

Photograph: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images

Adults awaiting an autism diagnosis face a postcode lottery in England, with some NHS centres more than twice as likely as others to give a positive assessment of the condition.

Landmark research from University College London (UCL) suggests people have an 85% chance of being diagnosed as autistic in some centres compared with a 35% chance in others.

The findings, from the Improving Adult Autism Assessment study, have not yet been peer-reviewed but have already been picked up by NHS England for further investigation.


William Mandy, a professor of neurodevelopmental conditions at UCL, who led the research across several NHS foundations in southern England, said the wide variation suggested a lack of consistency between centres. He said it raised fears that lives could be badly affected by inaccurate diagnoses and called for “radical changes” to the system.

“Our results worryingly suggest that people are being overdiagnosed in some areas and underdiagnosed in others,” said Mandy.

The study considered a range of possible reasons behind the variation. But, he said, his conclusion was that “someone could go to one well-established clinic and get one answer as to whether they’re autistic, then go to another well-established clinic and get a completely different answer despite displaying exactly the same behavioural traits”.

“The fact is that the diagnostic manuals are open to a lot of interpretation and so there is fundamentally a lack of consensus as to where the right boundaries of autism are,” he added.

Dr James Cusack, the chief executive of Autistica, the UK’s leading autism research charity, said Mandy’s results did not surprise him. “Autism diagnosis can be a wild west in terms of inconsistencies in approach,” he said. “We know of many good quality assessment centres where people aren’t getting access to proper autism diagnoses because that centre follows untested diagnostic practices, sometimes even ones they’ve developed themselves.”

Cusack suggested the research indicated people were being overdiagnosed and said that “unless something is done to regulate this, it will affect public trust in diagnoses per se”.

He also said there were large regional variations in diagnoses. He pointed to research that found up to 4% of children aged 10 to 14 years old are being diagnosed in some areas, compared with 1.5% in others.

“That’s really dangerous because it means there’s no clarity in what a diagnosis is for, who it is for and how systems support the wide range of people being given a positive diagnosis,” he said.

Unlike Cusack, Mandy guesses that there is more underdiagnosis of adults than overdiagnosis. “But the key question is, ‘What level of diagnosis is correct?’ and the honest answer is nobody knows,” he said. “But the fact that there isn’t a consistent conversion rate between referrals and diagnoses is very troubling.”

Mandy said his results “show we need radical change in the way autism diagnoses are given”. He said: “Our findings worry me because this is a high-stakes assessment that is really important in affecting somebody’s identity, their access to services and funds, and their life decisions.”

The government’s 2010 autism strategy recommended the establishment of specialist, community-based, multidisciplinary teams to provide, coordinate and oversee services. However, there is no guidance around the staffing of these teams or how they should operate. As a result, a number of different models have emerged.

Bryony Beresford, a professor at the University of York, conducted the first national evaluation of specialist autism team service models in 2020. She also found a wide variation in reported rates of diagnosis, ranging from less than 50% to more than 80%.

“Each team differed in their diagnostic assessment protocols and each was unique,” she said. “In addition, unlike some diagnoses, clinical judgment is central to the autism diagnostic process and this will contribute to variation. Does this mean we can’t trust diagnoses? We just don’t yet have the evidence to say yes or no to that question.”

Dr Peter Carpenter, the chair of the Neurodevelopmental Psychiatry Special Interest Group, agreed that it was “very much in the eye of the clinician-beholder as to whether someone is diagnosed as autistic or not”.

He said there needed to be a national agreement of common practice and thresholds but that a level of variation was inevitable. “How do you get a definition of autism that experts can work to precisely and consistently which covers everybody at all ages and includes both members of Mensa and the most profoundly intellectually disabled?” he asked. “All our criteria involve a large amount of room for interpretation by individual clinicians.”

Many are now turning to independent diagnostic assessments but the National Autistic Society (NAS) said their decisions could not necessarily be relied on either. “There are many providers out there now, some for profit and others not for profit,” said Dr Sarah Lister Brook, NAS’s clinical director. “Some are regulated – many are commissioned by the NHS to deal with NHS waiting lists – but some operate with minimal regulation or oversight so the quality is variable.”

An NHS spokesperson said: “The NHS is fully committed to supporting and improving the lives of autistic people, and published new national guidance for autism assessment services to ensure local areas can manage the 50% increase in referrals they have seen over last year while ensuring people have the support they need as they wait to be assessed.”

 Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI)

workers and supporters celebrate charity’s 200th anniversary


Ella Nunn, PA
Mon, 4 March 2024 

The Archbishop of Canterbury has praised Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) staff as “models for everyone” who “risk their lives for those who are not known to them” as the charity celebrated its 200th anniversary at a thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey.

Crews, lifeguards and representatives from RNLI teams across the country gathered on Monday to mark the occasion, at the same time the organisation’s founding papers were signed in 1824.

The ceremony was attended by the Duke of Kent, president of the RNLI, who signed the charity’s 200th pledge scroll, which was also signed by Justin Welby and the Dean of Westminster.


RNLI chief executive Mark Dowie told the PA news agency: “The service was an incredibly special way to mark 200 years of selfless commitment and to remember all that’s gone before, including the hundreds of RNLI lives lost over the years.”

The archbishop said in his address that “a common purpose for 200 years is almost unknown” and thanked the 1,800-strong congregation for tackling “demands that could never have been imagined”.

The charity’s lifeboat crews and lifeguards have saved more than 144,000 lives since its formation in 1824.

Mr Dowie gave a vote of thanks during the service and said the organisation had “survived the test of time, including tragic losses, funding challenges, two World Wars and, more recently, a global pandemic”.

William Dougan, a helmsman from the Stranraer lifeboat station in Scotland, told the PA news agency: “Days like these make you very proud – I’ve served with the RNLI for 22 years and it’s been great to come together and see other crews today.

“The service was very humble, there were some comical aspects which was nice, and it was also very traditional with the reading of the pledge and the prayers.”

The Duke of Kent (second from right) arrives to attend the service of thanksgiving

Three RNLI lifeboats were brought to the abbey and put on display – the historic William Riley, an oar-powered boat built in 1909; a modern Shannon class boat; and a D class lifeboat first introduced into the fleet in 1963.

A hymn was sung during the service which included a new verse, written by an RNLI crew member from Anstruther in Fife.

Richard MacDonald wrote the verse for the hymn Eternal Father Strong to Save after three members of the French lifeboat service were lost at sea in storm force conditions.

It was aired for the first time on television on Sunday during a Songs of Praise special episode and was sung by the congregation at Westminster Abbey during the ceremony, after it was approved by the archbishop.

Mr Dowie said while the service was held to reflect and celebrate the past 200 years, he also hoped it would inspire the next generation: “We are really keen to inspire the next generation – although today was about looking back and celebrating the past 200 years, we want to make sure we keep going for another 200.”