Author: News Editor

The UK may be perilously close to a recession, businesses may be closing and the city may be deep in the doldrums, but there is one segment of the finance industry that’s still booming. No matter the economic headwinds, the Bank of Mum and Dad seems to do booming business nonetheless.

According to statistics released this week, relatives are funding a higher proportion of property purchases than ever before. This year, the total amount of such lending is expected to reach £8bn, and then grow again to £10bn by 2025. At this rate, I wouldn’t blink if it reached £20bn or more by the end of the decade.

But while it’s easy enough to understand why parents want to help their children, the increasing importance of the familial hand-out is contributing to huge divides in society, draining retirement resources and helping to further tie up capital that could be used more productively.

The Bank of Mum and Dad, and the housing market that gives rise to it, is becoming a huge drag on the economy. The only way we can fix this is by finally summoning up the political will to build more houses.

Parents – and the occasional wealthy aunt or uncle for the very lucky – have been helping to get young people started on the property ladder for generations. Yet until relatively recently, that hand up was seen as something restricted to the wealthy upper-middle classes, not dissimilar to sending children to private schools.

While parental assistance might have been a bit more common than that – between a quarter and a fifth of buyers from 1970 to 2004 had help from their parents – it certainly wasn’t the norm. After all, very few people had a spare £10,000 or so lying around to help a kid or two buy their first home.

Over the last two decades, however, that has changed. Family help to buy has become a completely critical component of the property market, and by extension the wider economy as well.

In 2023, relatives are expected to contribute some £8.1bn to help young people buy properties. That money will help close almost half of all purchases by the under 55s, with total lending up 50pc on 2020 and the average sum given reaching almost £26,000.

Large chunks of the British property market seem now to be dependent on intergenerational transfers to keep moving. Take that away, and things will seize up.

It’s not particularly hard to understand why it’s happening. There’s nothing more natural in the world than wanting to help your children or grandchildren get on in life. It’s usually a force for good, motivating people to build up capital, and look after it sensibly.

And at least it recycles some of the £8.7 trillion the UK has locked up in housing wealth – £7 trillion after mortgage debts – between generations.

Yet we also shouldn’t kid ourselves that there’s anything healthy or natural about an economy that has become utterly dependent on older relatives doling out chunks of money. In fact, there are three big problems with the dominance of the Bank of Mum and Dad.

First, it’s contributing to an increasingly wide divide in society between those who can and those who can’t afford to buy property. If one half of the population is getting £26,000 handouts for the deposit on their first home while the other half is not, then huge numbers of people will be finding themselves locked out of homeownership. There is nothing to be celebrated about that.

As Mrs Thatcher quite rightly recognised back in the 1980s, homeownership is not just about having a place to live. It creates a stake in a prosperous, free market economy, it encourages hard work and responsibility and it allows people to build up personal wealth.

Anyone who holds down a steady job should be able to buy a home. If we restrict it to people with well-off grandparents or parents, we will destroy aspiration and ambition.

Next, it drains retirement savings. People are living longer, and medical treatments are getting more and more expensive, while the triple-lock on pensions has become a bigger and bigger strain on the public finances.

And yet at precisely the time when we should be making sure older people can look after themselves financially we are using their money to keep the property market afloat.

Many people look into equity release loans on their own homes in order to help their children buy theirs. In turn, that may well mean having no money left to pay for a care home. It is crazy.

Finally, and perhaps worst of all, it continues the cycle of locking up capital in housing, when we could be directing investment towards the real economy instead.

Just imagine the impact it would have on the British economy if the £8bn going towards buying apartments were directed to entrepreneurs or small businesses looking to scale up their operations? Instead, all we’re doing is keeping house prices artificially high.

The Left will no doubt soon start arguing that we need restrictions on the Bank of Mum and Dad, arguing for controls on gifts, or even more plausibly trying to replace inheritance tax with a levy on any capital transferred from one person to another. All that will do is make the problem even worse.

The real issue is the UK’s dysfunctional property market, which has become a huge drag on both the economy and society, and the only fix for that is to finally start to build more homes.

We may well have to start contemplating some genuinely radical changes to make that happen: rethinking the green belt would be a good start, so that we can expand our most productive cities; so would scrapping judicial review for planning to prevent local activists from using the courts to delay projects for years; and mandating local councils to free up a lot more land for development, and to do so a lot more quickly.

However it gets done, until the UK works out how to unblock its planning system and start building more it will be impossible to start growing again – and the Bank of Mum and Dad will keep on getting raided.

Culled from The Telegraph

Veterans Affairs investigators discovered that thousands of American pilots may have falsified their medical history.sharrocks/Getty Images

Federal officials are probing roughly 5,000 pilots suspected of withholding major health issues, per The Washington Post.

Veterans Affairs investigators stumbled on the health record inconsistencies over two years ago.

Some veterans who have been temporarily grounded feel as though they’re being singled out.

Federal authorities have been probing roughly 5,000 pilots who officials believe may have falsified their medical records to hide that they were earning benefits for significant health issues that could imperil their ability to fly safely, The Washington Post reported.

The pilots who have had their records examined are military veterans who informed the Federal Aviation Administration that they were suitable to fly, but didn’t disclose that they were also receiving veterans benefits for various disabilities that could prevent them from effectively sitting in a pilot’s seat.

Veterans Affairs investigators stumbled on the record inconsistencies over two years ago, but the FAA had not publicly disclosed many aspects of the investigation, according to The Post.

FAA spokesman Matthew Lehner told The Post that the agency had been probing around 4,800 pilots “who might have submitted incorrect or false information as part of their medical applications” and indicated that roughly half of the cases were closed. The spokesman also said 60 pilots who “posed a clear danger to aviation safety” were — for the moment — barred from the cockpit while their records were being looked over by officials.

Nearly 600 of the pilots who are being probed have licenses to fly the general public on passenger airlines, according to individuals with knowledge of the cases who spoke to The Post.

Many of the other pilots possess commercial licenses, which gives them ability to be hired to fly for a range of clients.

Pilots have to pass regular health screenings, but according to The Post, the tests are often not always comprehensive. And the FAA is reliant on pilots disclosing conditions that officials may not be able to pinpoint, including depression or post-traumatic stress, according to doctors who spoke to the newspaper and oversee the exams.

According to The Post, some veterans have downplayed their health conditions to the FAA in efforts to retain their eligibility to fly, while also inflating the severity their health conditions to the Veterans Administration in order to boost their disability payments.

Some pilots have been grounded while investigators review their medical history to the FAA.d3sign/Getty Images

Thousands of pilots may be risks to the “flying public”

The Post obtained records that reveal the FAA’s Office of Aerospace Medicine since last year has set aside $3.6 million to bring onboard medical staffers to conduct additional reviews of certification records for 5,000 pilots who might present “potential risks to the flying public.”

Officials at the Department of Transportation declined to comment to The Post regarding the report.

“The FAA used a risk-based approach to identify veterans whose medical conditions posed the greatest risk to safety and instructed them to cease flying while the agency reviews their cases,” the FAA’s Lehner said in a statement. “The vast majority of these pilots may continue to operate safely while we complete the reconciliation process.”

In some of the closed cases, pilots have been told to resubmit more accurate records and sit for new health exams, while some have been unable to fly until they’re cleared by the FAA, according to Lehner and lawyers for affected pilots.

And the VA inspector general’s office is now probing some of the 4,800 pilots and will look into whether the Department of Justice should be involved in individual cases regarding potential benefits fraud, according to two individuals who knowledge of the subject who spoke with The Post.

For two decades, the FAA has been aware that thousands of pilots may have been flying with significant health ailments, but transportation officials pushed back against calls for more substantial background checks for pilots, according to The Post.

The FAA review has also brought about an array of criticism from military veterans who feel as though the probes haven’t been applied equally.

“If they’re going to shine a light on veterans, they need to shine a light everywhere,” former Army pilot Rick Mangini told The Post.

Mangini has been unable to fly for his position at a cargo company after his medical certificate lapsed last month; he had not revealed a sleep apnea condition, for which he received benefits from the VA.

While Mangini disclosed on his application that he was receiving disability benefits, he told The Post that he didn’t know he had to detail his condition.

“I know of a lot of pilots who have told me about [medical conditions] they aren’t telling the FAA about,” he said. “What they’re doing to veterans? That’s the definition of harassment.”

Culled from Business Insider

A revolutionary satellite that will reveal celestial objects in a new light and the “Moon Sniper” lunar lander are expected to lift off Sunday night.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launch, already rescheduled twice due to bad weather, will occur aboard an H-IIA rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center at 8:26 p.m. ET Sunday, or 9:26 a.m. Japan Standard Time on Monday.

The event will stream live on JAXA’s YouTube channel, offering a broadcast in both English and Japanese. The live stream will begin at 7:55 p.m. ET Sunday.

The XRISM satellite (pronounced “crism”), also called the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, is a joint mission between JAXA and NASA, along with participation from the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency.

Along for the ride is JAXA’s SLIM, or Smart Lander for Investigating Moon. This small-scale exploration lander is designed to demonstrate a “pinpoint” landing at a specific location within 100 meters (328 feet), rather than the typical kilometer range, by relying on high-precision landing technology. The precision led to the mission’s nickname, Moon Sniper.

The satellite and its two instruments will observe the universe’s hottest regions, largest structures and objects with the strongest gravity, according to NASA. XRISM will detect X-ray light, a wavelength invisible to humans.

Studying stellar explosions and black holes

X-rays are released by some of the most energetic objects and events in the universe, which is why astronomers want to study them.

“Some of the things we hope to study with XRISM include the aftermath of stellar explosions and near-light-speed particle jets launched by supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies,” said Richard Kelley, XRISM principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement. “But of course, we’re most excited about all the unexpected phenomena XRISM will discover as it observes our cosmos.”

Compared with other wavelengths of light, X-rays are so short that they pass through the dish-shaped mirrors that observe and collect visible, infrared and ultraviolet light such as the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes.

With that in mind, XRISM has thousands of curved individual nested mirrors better designed to detect X-rays. The satellite will need to calibrate for a few months once it reaches orbit. The mission is designed to operate for three years.

The satellite can detect X-rays that have energies ranging from 400 to 12,000 electron volts, which is far beyond the energy of visible light at 2 to 3 electron volts, according to NASA. This range of detection will allow for studying cosmic extremes across the universe.

The satellite carries two instruments called Resolve and Xtend. Resolve tracks tiny temperature shifts that help it determine the source, composition, motion and physical state of X-rays. Resolve operates at minus 459.58 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.10 degrees Celsius), a temperature about 50 times colder than that of deep space, thanks to a refrigerator-size container of liquid helium.

This instrument will help astronomers unlock cosmic mysteries such as the chemical details of glowing hot gas inside galactic clusters.

“XRISM’s Resolve instrument will let us peer into the make-up of cosmic X-ray sources to a degree that hasn’t been possible before,” Kelley said. “We anticipate many new insights about the hottest objects in the universe, which include exploding stars, black holes and galaxies powered by them, and clusters of galaxies.”

Meanwhile, Xtend will provide XRISM with one of the largest fields of view on an X-ray satellite.

“The spectra XRISM collects will be the most detailed we’ve ever seen for some of the phenomena we’ll observe,” said Brian Williams, NASA’s XRISM project scientist at Goddard, in a statement. “The mission will provide us with insights into some of the most difficult places to study, like the internal structures of neutron stars and near-light-speed particle jets powered by black holes in active galaxies.”

Moon Sniper sets its sights on a crater

Meanwhile, SLIM will use its own propulsion system to head toward the moon. The spacecraft will arrive in lunar orbit about three to four months after launch, orbit the moon for one month, and begin its descent and attempt a soft landing between four to six months after launch. If the lander is successful, the technology demonstration will also briefly study the lunar surface.

Unlike other recent lander missions aiming for the lunar south pole, SLIM is targeting a site near a small lunar impact crater called Shioli, in the vicinity of the Sea of Nectar, where it will investigate the composition of rocks that may help scientists uncover the origins of the moon. The landing site is just south of the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 landed near the moon’s equator in 1969.

Following the United States, the former Soviet Union and China, India became the fourth country to execute a controlled landing on the moon when its Chandrayaan-3 mission arrived Wednesday near the lunar south pole. Previously, Japanese company Ispace’s Hakuto-R lunar lander fell 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) before crashing into the moon during a landing attempt in April.

The SLIM probe has vision-based navigation technology. Achieving precise landings on the moon is a key target for JAXA and other space agencies.

Resource-rich areas, such as the lunar south pole and its permanently shadowed regions filled with water ice, also present a number of hazards with craters and rocks. Future missions will need to be able to land within a narrow area to avoid these features.

SLIM also has a lightweight design that could be favorable as agencies plan more frequent missions and explore moons around other planets such as Mars. If SLIM is successful, JAXA contends, it will transform missions from “landing where we can to landing where we want.”