Billionaire Calls For A Three-Day Workweek

We should all get a four-day weekend every week, according to one of the most successful businessmen in the world.

Carlos Slim, the 74-year-old Mexican communications titan, recently told a business conference in Paraguay that we should only work three days a week, the Financial Times reported.

"Having four days [off] would be very important to generate new entertainment activities and other ways of being occupied," Slim said, according to the FT.

Around the world, people are retiring later in life than they used to. Cutting the workweek down to three days, and working about 11 hours a day, could keep workers healthy and their ideas fresh, Slim said.

American CEOs may have a thing or two to learn about work-life balance from Slim, who is either the richest or second-richest person on the planet, depending on who's counting. Slim's phone company Telmex reportedly lets some life-long workers retire younger than 50, and some older employees can opt to work shorter weeks, according to the FT.

American workers tend to be overworked. For decades, increases in worker productivity have far outpaced growth in wages. And the U.S. is the only developed country in the world that doesn't make companies give workers paid maternity leave.

Of course, overwork and prolonged stress are pretty terrible for your health.

And it seems employers tend to benefit from shorter workweeks, too.

"Better work gets done in four days than in five," Jason Fried, whose company 37signals switched to a four-day workweek for part of the year, wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times in 2012. "When there’s less time to work, you waste less time. When you have a compressed workweek, you tend to focus on what’s important."

Workers who have more flexible schedules also tend to take less time off. That was the case in Utah, where, in 2008, the state switched to a four-day workweek for all state employees as an experiment to lower energy consumption.

Malaysian Airliner Crash Sends Stocks Tumbling

* Malaysian Airliner downed in Ukraine war zone, 295 dead

* Morgan Stanley profit more than doubles, beats estimates

* Microsoft to cut up to 18,000 jobs, 14 percent of workforce

* Dow off 0.5 pct; S&P 500 down 0.7 pct; Nasdaq off 0.9 pct (Updates to afternoon)

By Angela Moon

NEW YORK, July 17 (Reuters) - U.S. stocks fell on Thursday in volatile trading on news that a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet crashed near the Ukraine-Russia border, after the United States and European Union imposed sanctions on Russia.

Investors sold equities in a move to avoid risk because of conflicting reports about the reason why the plane went down. A New York Stock Exchange floor trader, who spoke on condition of anonymity, cited reports that the plane might been shot down.

"What's happening in the market is what you'd expect, a risk reversal. Stocks fall a bit, gold rises a bit, energy prices are still high, the volatility index spikes," said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities in New York.

The CBOE Volatility index surged 17.6 percent to 12.94 and was on track to post its biggest daily percentage gain in at least three months. Spot gold rose 1.4 percent to above $1,315 an ounce and U.S. crude shot up 1.8 percent to $103.03 a barrel.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 89.26 points or 0.52 percent, to 17,048.94. The S&P 500 lost 14.37 points or 0.73 percent, to 1,967.20. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 40.89 points or 0.92 percent, to 4,385.08.

The major U.S. stock indexes opened modestly lower following news of fresh U.S. and European Union sanctions on Russia. Stronger-than-expected earnings, however, helped curb the declines.


By late morning, stocks slid to session lows after news that a Malaysian airliner was brought down over eastern Ukraine on Thursday. The crash killed all 295 people aboard and sharply increased the stakes in a conflict between Kiev and pro-Moscow rebels in which Russia and the West back opposing sides.

Ukraine accused "terrorists" - militants fighting to unite eastern Ukraine with Russia - of shooting down the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with a heavy Soviet-era ground-to-air missile as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

"If there's an escalation here and we go to Tier Three sanctions, think about the economic effect it has on Russia and its trading partners," Hogan said. "If sanctions become harsh enough and have enough economic impact on Russia, it could drag the core of Europe into a recession. That's the economic possibility."

The iShares China Large Cap ETF slipped 1.1 percent. The NYSE Arca airline index was down 1.6 percent.

The U.S. sanctions, which were announced late on Wednesday, hit some of Russia's biggest companies while the EU sanctions were aimed at Russian companies that help destabilize Ukraine and will block new loans to Russia through two multilateral lenders. The Market Vectors Russia ETF lost 6.4 percent.

Equities had been holding near the unchanged mark earlier in the session, largely on the back of solid earnings from companies such as Morgan Stanley, down 0.2 percent at $32.44, and UnitedHealth, up 2.4 percent at $85.77.

Microsoft shares rose 1.3 percent to $44.64 after the company said it would cut up to 18,000 jobs, or about 14 percent of its workforce, resulting in pre-tax charges of $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion over the next four quarters.

Data on manufacturing and the labor market indicated that the U.S. economy was improving, although the housing market remains weak. The PHLX housing index fell 1.6 percent.

S&P 500 companies' profits are expected to grow 4.9 percent in the second quarter, according to Thomson Reuters data, down from the 8.4 percent growth forecast at the start of April. Revenue is seen up 3 percent. (Reporting by Angela Moon; Editing by Jan Paschal)

GM Has Replaced Under 20 Percent Of Ignition Switches On Recalled Small Cars

DETROIT (AP) — General Motors says it has replaced faulty ignition switches on just under 20 percent of 2.6 million small cars that are being recalled.

The company has repaired just over 491,000 cars that are covered by the recall announced in February.

Switch maker Delphi Automotive says it has produced over 1 million parts and expects to have made 2 million by the end of August. GM says it expects all parts to be made by late October.

Delphi CEO Rodney O'Neal tells lawmakers his company has added three lines to speed up production.

Some car owners have complained it's taking too long for GM to finish repairs.

The switches can slip into the accessory position and unexpectedly shut off engines. That has caused crashes that killed at least 13 people.

Debt Collection 'Factory' Preyed On Broke Americans: Lawsuit

A federal watchdog is suing a collection agency that allegedly operated like a "factory" churning out lawsuits against cash-strapped borrowers, often using misleading, deceptive and illegal practices.

The suit is the latest effort by regulators to crack down on debt collection abuse. The billion-dollar industry has ballooned in size over the past two decades and is under fire for filing wrongful lawsuits against vulnerable borrowers.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced on Monday that it had sued Frederick J. Hanna & Associates, a Georgia-based law firm that sues consumers for old, outstanding debts owed to banks, debt buyers and credit card companies.

The complaint against Hanna & Associates alleges that the firm operated as a lawsuit "factory," cranking out more than 350,000 suits in Georgia alone since 2009. What's more, the company operates with a skeleton staff of eight to 16 lawyers who merely put their signature on lawsuits, while the bulk of the work at the firm is performed by "automated processes" and non-attorney staff, according to the CFPB complaint.

In 2009 and 2010, the suit claims, a single lawyer at the company signed off on about 138,000 lawsuits, an average of about 1,300 a week. Such a feat would seem to test the limits of physical endurance. The firm's lawyers were expected to spend "less than a minute" looking at each lawsuit before signing it, the suit contends.

The CFPB complaint names the law firm's president, Frederick Hanna, and two of the company's managing partners. It is asking for the firm to be fined, for its victims to be compensated, and for an injunction against the company and its partners.

The website for Hanna & Associates, which was founded in 1981, describes the company as a law firm dedicated exclusively to "creditors’ rights and recoveries." Although the agency also has offices in Florida and Missouri, CFPB spokesperson Moira Vahey told HuffPost the agency's lawsuit focuses on the firm's alleged activity in Georgia.

Hanna & Associates Managing Partner Joseph C. Cooling said in a statement that the firm strongly denies the allegations.

"Our law firm takes great pride in its commitment to compliance with all consumer protection laws and takes great pains every day to ensure compliance with state civil procedure and evidentiary laws, step by step," he said.

Businesses hire debt collection firms like Hanna & Associates to recover delinquent debts from consumers. It's most often credit card debt, but can include things like old cell phone or utility bills. The collection firms are typically paid a fee or a percentage of the debts they successfully collect.

Hanna & Associates' clients include high-profile banks like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Capital One and Discover, the federal lawsuit says. BofA and Discover declined to comment. The other banks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Vahey said the probe is still ongoing. "The Bureau is still collecting evidence and will continue to do so as the case proceeds through the court system," she said.

Unfortunately, Hanna & Associates' alleged tactics may not be the problems of just one rogue firm.

"These practices sound so familiar to me when I read this complaint," said Susan Shin of the New Economy Project, which advocates against predatory debt collection practices. "We're happy to see that the CFPB is going after these abusive practices. This sounds like it could be brought against a lot of collection firms."

The CFPB contends that many of the lawsuits filed by Hanna & Associates resulted in default judgments, which occur when a borrower doesn't show up for his or her court date. Depending on the state, these default judgements sometimes let creditors seize wages and savings or put liens on property.

Yet collectors don't always do their due diligence in properly tracking down consumers and verifying that the debts are valid. In June, HuffPost profiled a 69-year-old retired veteran who had his mother's house taken from him over a debt he said he didn't owe. The veteran, Willie Wilson of Elgin, Texas, said he never even received the notice to come to court.

Two Big Tobacco Companies Want To Merge

* BAT expects to buy more Reynolds shares to keep current stake

* Lorillard market value is $22.9 bln

* Imperial lining up about $7 bln to buy some brands - source (Recasts with Reynolds, Lorillard confirmation)

LONDON, July 11 (Reuters) - U.S. cigarette maker Reynolds American Inc is in talks to acquire rival Lorillard Inc in a multi-billion dollar deal that would include the sale of some brands to Britain's Imperial Tobacco Group Plc , the companies said on Friday.

In a statement confirming what people familiar with the matter previously told Reuters, Reynolds, No. 2 player in the United States with brands including Camel and Pall Mall, said the talks were consistent with its strategy of weighing options that would help boost shareholder value.

Buying Lorillard, which has a stock market value of $22.9 billion, would give Reynolds the leading U.S. menthol cigarette Newport and its leading e-cigarette blu.

It would also give it added scale to compete with Marlboro maker Altria Group Inc, in a market that is shrinking as more Americans quit smoking but which remains one of the biggest and most profitable tobacco markets in the world.

"Reynolds is getting both a fantastic brand in Newport and strong intellectual property in the e-cig category," said analyst Philip Gorham at research firm Morningstar. "It's a good deal strategically, we just need to know what they're paying."

At banking group Wells Fargo, analyst Bonnie Herzog estimated Reynolds would pay a premium of about 20 percent to Lorillard's latest closing price of $63.09 per share, which would value the company at $27.2 billion.

Cigarette sales volumes are declining in many mature markets due to rising health consciousness and weak economies. Yet their high price places them among the most profitable consumer goods. And electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, are growing rapidly despite the threat of increased regulation.

SUPPORTING THE DEAL

British American Tobacco Plc (BAT), which owns 42 percent of Reynolds, said that if such a deal proceeds, it would expect to support it by buying additional shares in Reynolds with the aim of maintaining its current stake.

Reynolds, Lorillard and BAT all said there were no assurances that a deal will be reached. They added that unless circumstances dictate otherwise, they did not intend to comment further.

Imperial, known for its Gauloises and Davidoff cigarettes, said it was in talks with Reynolds and Lorillard about buying certain assets they might sell but also saw no guarantee the proposed deal would come off.

A source familiar with the situation said Imperial was lining up about $7 billion to finance the potential purchase of brands such as Kool and Salem, which would ease antitrust concerns thrown up by a Reynolds-Lorillard combination.

"This transaction in our view will be very positive for the global tobacco industry and could be just the beginning of future transactions with (e-cigarettes/vapor products) being the underlying catalyst," said Wells Fargo's Herzog.

Imperial shares were up 2.9 percent at 2737 pence at 1258 GMT, while BAT shares were up 0.5 percent. (Editing by Jane Merriman and David Holmes)

Talkative Co-Workers Are Far More Distracting Than Email, Odors

We may live in an era of constant technological distractions, but Americans still find old-fashioned office gossip much more annoying than emails, phone calls and weird computer noise.

In a new survey by consulting firm Lee Hecht Harrison, 45 percent of workers said talkative co-workers were more distracting than anything else in the office. Emails came in a distant second place at 18 percent and odors in third at 9 percent.

Talkative co-workers: 45 percent
Emails: 18 percent
Odors: 9 percent
Telephone calls: 8 percent
Ambient noise: 6 percent
Office design: 5 percent
Technology: 4 percent
Nothing at all: 5 percent

“Overly talkative co-workers usually have no idea how annoying they are to their colleagues," Jim Greenway, vice president of marketing at Lee Hecht Harrison, wrote in a statement about the survey. "They simply lack the self-awareness to recognize the signals."

These days 70 percent of employees in the U.S. work in open-plan offices, where private offices and cubicles have been replaced with communal workspaces. Perhaps a buzzing smartphone doesn't seem that bad when compared to your co-worker's relationship drama.

Nevertheless, Greenway says that up to a point, office chatter does serve a purpose.

“Serendipitous conversations in the hallway or brief stops by a co-worker’s office or cubicle for some chit-chat can yield tremendous benefits in terms of collaboration, generating new ideas, creating trust and increasing productivity," he said.

The firm surveyed 848 U.S workers in an online poll conducted in April.

Citigroup May Pay $7 Billion To Resolve Mortgage Probe

By Karen Freifeld and Aruna Viswanatha

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON, July 8 (Reuters) - Citigroup Inc is close to paying about $7 billion to resolve a U.S. probe into whether it defrauded investors on billions of dollars worth of mortgage securities in the run-up to the financial crisis, a source familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

A majority of the settlement is expected to be in cash, but the figure also includes several billion dollars in help to struggling borrowers, the source said.

An announcement of the settlement between the bank and the U.S. Department of Justice could come as early as next week, the source said.

A Citigroup representative declined comment. A Justice Department spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment.

A settlement of around $7 billion for Citigroup would be higher than analysts had expected based on the bank's mortgage securities business.

Some Wall Street analysts had previously estimated that Citigroup likely had about $3 billion of reserves set aside for a related settlement. U.S. authorities had demanded more than $10 billion last month, Reuters reported.

Talks between U.S. authorities and Citigroup stalled last month after both sides stood far apart on a settlement figure and the Justice Department had prepared to sue the bank.

The bank is scheduled to report second-quarter results on Monday. Analysts, on average, have estimated the company would earn $3.4 billion.

U.S. Attorneys offices in Brooklyn and Colorado have been investigating the bank as part of a larger task force probing faulty mortgage securities that helped fuel the housing bubble in the mid-2000s and contributed to its collapse.

JPMorgan Chase & Co paid $13 billion in November to resolve a range of probes from the task force, in a deal that U.S. authorities said would serve as a template for other banks. Bank of America Corp has also been in negotiations to resolve similar investigations. (Reporting by Aruna Viswanatha in Washington and Karen Freifeld in New York, with additional reporting by David Henry in New York; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Obamacare Has Already Dramatically Increased Access To Free Birth Control

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than half of privately insured women are getting free birth control under President Barack Obama's health law, a major coverage shift that's likely to advance.

This week the Supreme Court allowed some employers with religious scruples to opt out, but most companies appear to be going in the opposite direction.

Recent data from the IMS Institute document a sharp change during 2013. The share of privately insured women who got their birth control pills without a copayment jumped to 56 percent, from 14 percent in 2012. The law's requirement that most health plans cover birth control as prevention, at no additional cost to women, took full effect in 2013.

The average annual saving for women was $269. "It's a big number," said institute director Michael Kleinrock. The institute is the research arm of IMS Health, a Connecticut-based technology company that uses pharmacy records to track prescription drug sales.

The core of Obama's law — taxpayer-subsidized coverage for the uninsured — benefits a relatively small share of Americans. But free preventive care— from flu shots to colonoscopies —is a dividend of sorts for the majority with employer coverage.

Expanded preventive coverage hasn't gotten as much attention as another bonus for the already insured: the provision that allows young adults to remain on their parents' policy until they turn 26. That may start to change with all the discussion of birth control.

Business groups and employee benefits consultants say they see little chance that employers will roll back contraceptive coverage as a result of the Supreme Court ruling. The court carved out a space for "closely held" companies whose owners object on religious grounds. Most companies don't fit that niche.

"I don't think you will see a broad impact," said Neil Trautwein, the top employee benefits expert for the National Retail Federation. "It's a commonly offered benefit for many employers, including retailers."

The court decision involved "a very unique set of facts," Trautwein added. "Intense religious beliefs, closely held companies and the vehement objection to contraceptive coverage."

Before the Supreme Court ruling, some "grandfathered" plans unchanged since the health care law passed were already exempt from covering prevention at no cost, but that number is expected to shrink over time as employers make coverage changes.

IMS says it is still too early to discern the health care law's ultimate impact on birth control.

At least for now, it doesn't seem like more women are going on birth control because it's free. The number of prescriptions for oral contraceptives that were filled grew in 2013, but at about the same rate as in recent years.

There's also not much evidence of a shift to costlier long-acting contraceptives, such as hormonal implants. More reliable than the pill, they are gaining popularity in other economically advanced countries.

"Awareness of the provisions of the law has not been very clear sometimes," said Kleinrock. "Certainly this is something we are going to be watching."

Birth control use is virtually universal in the United States, but about half of all pregnancies are still unplanned. Forgetting to take the pill is a major reason.

As recently as the 1990s, many health insurance plans didn't even cover birth control. Protests, court cases and new state laws changed that. Obama's law is taking it another step.

Many medical groups see a strong rationale for free birth control. Contraception can help make a woman's next pregnancy healthier by spacing births far enough apart, generally 18 months to two years. Closely spaced births carry a risk of such problems as prematurity, low birth weight, even autism. And even modest copays for medical care can discourage its use.

"It's one of the most concrete ways that women have seen that the Affordable Care Act is helping them," said Amy Allina, deputy director of the National Women's Health Network, an advocacy that supports the law's requirement.

The South Is Essentially A Solid, Grim Block Of Poverty

The Great Recession and Not-So-Great Recovery have been bad news for most Americans, but some people have suffered more than others. We call those people "Southerners."

North Carolina and a handful of other Southern U.S. states saw the biggest increases in the number of people living in what are known as "poverty areas" between 2000 and 2010, according to a new Census Bureau report. Poverty areas are places where more than 20 percent of the people live below the federal poverty line, which varies by family size. For a family of four, the poverty line in most states is an annual income of $23,850.

Today, 25.7 percent of all Americans live in such areas, up from 18.1 percent in 2000, according to the report. Having a quarter of the nation living this way is a problem: Poverty areas are typically marked by "higher crime rates, poor housing conditions, and fewer job opportunities," the report points out.

This map, created by plugging Census data into the Datawrapper mapping tool, shows the rise was not exactly spread evenly across the country:

Note that Southern states were five of the six biggest gainers. This should not be much of a shock, as Southern states consistently lag the rest of the country in good things like wages, economic mobility and access to health care, while leading it in bad things like poverty, obesity and general unhappiness. Another thing Southern states have in common is Republican political leaders that have spent the past decade shrinking the social safety net.

Bucking the trend, two Southern states, Louisiana and West Virginia, actually saw the number of people living in poverty areas shrink during the decade.

And the region that saw the biggest overall rise in the number of people living in poverty areas between 2000 and 2010 was the Midwest, not the South. That may be because the Midwest had relatively low numbers to start. Its numbers are still relatively low -- though it now has more people living in poverty areas than the Northeast, which fared pretty well during the recession and recovery. As you can see from this Census graph, the South started out with very high rates of people living in poverty areas and got even higher, with nearly a third of all Southerners living in poverty areas:

And this Census map highlights the difference between regions even more starkly. Look at that solid, grim block of poverty:

BNP Pleads Guilty To Criminal Charges, Agrees To Pay $8.8 Billion

NEW YORK, June 30 (Reuters) - BNP Paribas on Monday pleaded guilty to two criminal charges and agreed to forfeit $8.83 billion, as part of a broad investigation into allegations the French bank violated U.S. sanctions laws.

A lawyer for BNP briefly appeared in New York state court on Monday, to answer one count of falsifying business records, and one count of conspiracy.

One of the prosecutors said BNP engaged in a "long-term, multi-jurisdictional conspiracy" to violate sanctions laws by facilitating transactions involving Sudan, Cuba, and Iran. (Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Karey Van Hall and Sandra Maler)