Currently, the BMW X7 is powered by a standard 3.0-liter turbocharged inline-six with 335 horsepower and 330 lb-ft of torque, a twin-turbocharged V8 with 456 hp and 479 lb-ft, and the same engine with an increased power output of 523 hp and 553 lb-ft in the M50i. The X7 starts with an MSRP of $74,900. BMW is yet to announce the debut of the updated model, but don't expect to see it in 2020.
Since winning the election, Biden has made moves to carry out his campaign promise of building an administration that looks like and reflects the diversity of America. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris has already shattered a monumental barrier by becoming the first woman elected Vice President.
Here are other people who would be historic firsts:
First Black Deputy Secretary of the Treasury
Adewale "Wally" Adeyemo
Adeyemo currently serves as the president of the Obama Foundation. Adeyemo served during the Obama administration as the President's senior international economic adviser, and also served as deputy national security adviser, deputy director of the National Economic Council, the first chief of staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and senior adviser and deputy chief of staff at the Department of the Treasury.
First Hispanic American White House Social Secretary
Carlos Elizondo
Elizondo was a special assistant to the president and social secretary to the Bidens for all eight years of the Obama administration. He will be the first Hispanic American appointed to this position. During the Clinton administration, Elizondo served in both the White House and in the Office of the US Chief of Protocol.
First woman to lead the US intelligence community
Avril Haines
Haines would become the first woman to serve as director of national intelligence. Haines served as assistant to the president and principal deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama. She chaired the National Security Council's Deputies Committee, which is responsible for formulating the administration's national security and foreign policy. Haines previously served as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Avril was also legal adviser to the NSC. She served as deputy chief counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while Biden served as chairman.
First Latino and immigrant as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security
Alejandro Mayorkas
Mayorkas would be the first Latino and immigrant as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security if confirmed by the Senate. He was deputy secretary of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, and served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security's United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. While at USCIS, Mayorkas oversaw the implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which was an executive action under Obama that protected young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation. President Donald Trump moved to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2017 but was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court from doing so.
First woman of color to chair the Council of Economic Advisers
Cecilia Rouse
Rouse would be the first woman of color to chair the Council of Economic Advisers if confirmed by the Senate. Rouse has served as the dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, as well as a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. Rouse previously served as a member of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. She also worked at the National Economic Council in the Clinton administration as a special assistant to the president.
First woman of color and first South Asian American as Director of the Office of Management and Budget
Neera Tanden
Tanden would be the first woman of color and first South Asian American to become director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden is the CEO and president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, and is the CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Tanden previously served in the Obama and Clinton administrations. She was a senior adviser for health reform at the US Department of Health and Human Services, and also served as the director of domestic policy for the Obama campaign. She was the policy director for Hillary Clinton's first presidential campaign, and worked in Clinton's Senate office.
First woman as Treasury Secretary
Janet Yellen
Yellen would make history as the first woman to serve as Treasury secretary. Yellen already made history as the first woman to have chaired the Federal Reserve, and did so from 2014 to 2018. She previously served for four years as the vice chair of the board, and president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco for four years prior to that. Yellen was also chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999.
While there's support from both Republicans and Democrats for sending out another round of payments, it's unlikely Americans will get a second round of stimulus checks before the end of the year -- and lawmakers have been unable to come to any agreement on a broader economic aid package.
Congress returns to Washington this week focused on passing a broader spending bill by December 11 to avert a partial government shutdown, though it's possible that some relief programs could be added to such a broader spending bill.
If anything, those provisions may extend programs set to expire on December 31 -- including expanded unemployment benefits, an eviction moratorium and a pause on student loan payments.
Disagreements over new checks
There's been little talk from lawmakers of a second round of stimulus checks since the summer. The most recent stimulus package proposal put forth by Republicans, who currently control the Senate, didn't include money for direct payments.
President-elect Joe Biden supports a $3 trillion Democratic-backed bill that passed the House in May, which provided for a second round of checks. But that package has little chance of passing Congress unless Democrats gain control of the Senate by winning both runoff Senate races in Georgia set for January 5.
More than 160 million Americans received stimulus payments earlier in the year, after Congress approved a $2 trillion aid package in March. They helped keep many families out of poverty as millions of people lost their jobs due to the pandemic.
But for many, that $1,200 check has already been spent. Now, as coronavirus cases surge, a group of more than 120 economists are urging lawmakers to approve another round of checks, arguing that they are "one of the quickest, most equitable, and most effective ways to get families and the economy back on track."
Congress has already allowed some relief programs to expire, like the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses and the $600 federal boost to weekly unemployment benefits.
But others end this month. If Congress adds any stimulus to the general spending bill, they may prioritize pushing back those deadlines.
Expanded unemployment benefits
As part of the historic broadening of jobless benefits under the CARES Act, lawmakers created three programs to help out-of-work Americans. While the $600 payment enhancement lasted only four months, the other two run through the week ending December 26, which is the last weekend of the year.
One of them, the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, allows independent contractors, the self-employed and gig workers to qualify for payments. It also opens up the program to those who can't work because of the pandemic, including if they or family members are ill or quarantining or if their children's schools are closed.
The other program, called Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, provides an additional 13 weeks of federally paid benefits to those who run out of state payments, which typically last 26 weeks.
Student loan payment pause
In March, the US government automatically suspended payments and waived interest on federal student loans. That meant millions of borrowers could skip making their monthly payments without their balances getting any bigger.
Initially, the relief -- which was included in the $2 trillion congressional stimulus package -- was set to expire at the end of September. But President Donald Trump later moved the date to December 31 by an executive action.
If neither Trump or Congress acts to push the deadline back, millions of student loan payments will come due a couple of weeks before Biden takes office on January 20. Even if Biden reinstates the pause retroactively, it could create confusion for borrowers as well as a mess for student loan processors, who aren't built to suddenly stop or start payment.
Eviction protection
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order that went into effect in September temporarily halted evictions through the end of the year. It applies to renters who meet certain income requirements, have experienced significant losses of income and have made their best efforts to find rental assistance and pay their rent.
Since the order does not cancel or freeze rent, all of a tenant's back rent will be due January 1 if the moratorium is allowed to expire. Without rent relief or an extension of the protection, many struggling renters will again face eviction.
An eviction moratorium established by Congress in March shielded only tenants who receive federal assistance or live in rental properties with federally backed financing. That protection lapsed over the summer.
Paid family leave
Earlier in the year, lawmakers expanded paid family leave benefits for many workers who become ill or are caring for someone else.
It was limited to employees of companies with fewer than 500 workers but provided up to two weeks of paid sick leave and an additional 10 weeks of paid expanded family leave for parents who need to care for children whose schools closed.
However, the payments are capped, and small businesses can apply for waivers from the provisions affecting workers whose children's schools have shut down.
Those benefits also are set to expire on December 31.
CNN's Tami Luhby and Lauren Fox contributed reporting.
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Don't expect a second stimulus check this year. Here's what Congress is talking about instead - CNN
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Early bitcoin investors and founders of crypto-exchange Gemini, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, see bitcoin gaining more than 25 times its current value as more investors adopt the cryptocurrency as an inflation hedge.
"We think it will be the best performing asset of the current decade," Tyler Winklevoss said in an interview with Seema Mody on CNBC's "Squawk Box" Monday.
"Our thesis is that Bitcoin is gold 2.0 and it will disrupt gold. If it does that it has to have a market cap of $9 trillion. So we think bitcoin could price one day at $500,000 a bitcoin. So at $18,000 bitcoin it's a hold or if you don't have any its a buy opportunity because we think there's a 25x from here," Tyler expounded.
The price of Bitcoin rose 5% on Monday to top $19,000 as investors continue to pile back into the cryptocurrency in 2020. The price of bitcoin was trading around $19,022, according to data from industry site CoinDesk. The cryptocurrency first climbed near the $20,000 mark in December of 2017. It collapsed soon after, and had not recovered to the $18,000 level until recent weeks.
The asset is up over 160% this year with interest from big-name investors such as Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller. Fintech giants Square and PayPal have lowered the barrier for entry into the asset.
"I think a lot of it is investors coming in and realizing that inflation, there's a specter of inflation out there and how do you protect against that? I think there's not much of a debate about all the debt that's increased in the U.S., the money printing, so how do you defend against that?" Cameron Winklevoss added. "I think a lot of people are starting to realize that bitcoin is really the best defense and offers the opportunity for an asymmetric return of something like 25 to 40x from here. I don't think there's an asset in the universe that can credibly offer that kind of potential and protect against inflation."
The Winklevoss twins said gold has historically been the classic hedge, but bitcoin is moving in as gold 2.0.
"It doesn't really need to be a great medium of exchange, it just needs to be better than gold and it's better across the board. So bitcoin, the supply is fixed at 21 million. Gold is scarce. Bitcoin's software it can be sent through the internet, like email, gold is hardware and its hard to transport," Cameron Winklevoss said.
The total number of bitcoins that will ever be produced is capped at 21 million. The digital asset underwent a key technical event in the spring known as the "halving," which saw the amount of bitcoins rewarded to the so-called "miners" who add bitcoin transactions to its public ledger get cut in half.
The Winklevoss twins are not concerned about regulation headwinds for the digital asset.
"Back in 2013, there was a question about whether bitcoin was going to be outlawed. We're way passed that. We believed in healthy, thoughtful regulation. We don't see that not continuing. We think bitcoin's here to stay, we think thoughtful regulation around it in the U.S. and other sophisticated jurisdictions is also here to stay," Tyler Winklevoss said.
"Bitcoin is still the best performing asset of the year, even compared to equities," he added.
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NORTH LAWNDALE — The city’s planning department unveiled possibilities for what the forthcoming Ogden Commons development could look like at a recent North Lawndale community meeting.
Ogden Commons, to be built in the 2600-2700 blocks of West Ogden Avenue, is a core piece of the North Lawndale Quality-of-Life Plan, a community-driven blueprint for addressing key issues like health disparities and public safety. The development will have affordable housing, public art, restaurants, retail space and a one-stop-shop outpatient medical center.
Neighbors were able to review three concept designs for the $200 million multi-use development at the final North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council neighborhood meeting of the year. The project is slated to be completed by 2026, and the final design and offerings of the project will depend on the outcome of a request for proposal the city will launch in the coming weeks.
The designs are not intended to represent the final layout of the Ogden Commons project, but rather to invite residents to imagine possibilities for the development and offer feedback, said Brian Hacker, a coordinating planner with the city’s planning department.
“We are going to have the community involved in the evaluation process. We want to, as much as possible, prioritize a project here that has community ownership,” Hacker said.
A lower-density design for Ogden Commons emphasizes ground-level retail.Provided
One design shows a widened streetscape to improve walkability along Ogden, with the development including a hotel, an affordable housing complex, a mixed-use office building and retail center. Other designs showed a lower-density development with an emphasis on public space.
“Whether it’s a performance space or pop-up retail, food trucks or things like that, we think a site like this should include a component where there’s an opportunity to activate it at the street level,” Hacker said.
A lower-density visualization of Ogden Commons that emphasizes street-level public space.Provided.
Residents at the meeting suggested Ogden Commons include amenities like a café and a business incubator since the neighborhood lacks gathering places and small businesses. But Hacker said the planning department is incorporating community feedback by trying to include space for retailers, grocers and other organizations that respond to the needs of residents.
“One thing that we have heard quite a bit is the lack of a grocery store here in the community,” Hacker said. “We’re putting forward in the request for proposal that these are the type of uses we want to see.”
The city is supporting the Ogden Commons development with tax increment financing funds, low-income housing tax credits and other public dollars aligned through the INVEST South/West initiative to support up to half of costs, Hacker said. Two businesses, Ja’ Grill and Steak ‘n Shake, have received Neighborhood Opportunity Fund grants to finance storefronts at the site.
About $7 million of the city’s federal CARES Act funding was directed toward the ambulatory center that will be an anchor for the development. The medical center will be run by Sinai Health System as a one-stop shop for outpatient care and wraparound services that address social issues behind health disparities in the area.
“This entire project addresses the holistic person. Not just the health care needs, but the mental and psychological needs and the quality of life as a whole,” hospital COO Airica Steed said.
The city wants Ogden Commons to be a commercially successful development that generates enough revenue to attract private support.
“We want people in North Lawndale to be able to walk down the block to get a cup of coffee, pick up some necessities, be able to go out to eat at a sit-down restaurant,” Hacker said. “We’re hoping a project like this can be catalytic … so those kinds of uses can be more common.”
Pascal Sabino is a Report for America corps member covering Austin, North Lawndale and Garfield Park for Block Club Chicago.
The nation was heading into winter with the threat of a new infectious disease from abroad causing widespread panic. Hospitals lacked proper protective gear and were struggling to contain outbreaks. And Donald Trump was using his Twitter account to attack Democratic officials over their handling of the virus and spread misinformation.
But this was 2014, not 2020. And the virus causing alarm around the globe was Ebola, not the coronavirus.
Six years ago, President Barack Obama and his administration feared the kind of calamitous situation the coronavirus has unfortunately caused. To help ensure that did not happen, Obama tapped a veteran Democratic operative, Ron Klain, to oversee the response to the outbreak in West Africa that had already made its way to the U.S.
Now Klain is on the verge of returning to the White House as chief of staff to President-elect Joe Biden as the country battles a raging pandemic far more deadly and pervasive than Ebola ever became. As one of the key architects of the incoming administration’s Covid-19 plan, Klain’s experience is already shaping how the next administration will respond.
“Klain’s Ebola work, in particular, has played into things hugely — starting back during the campaign with all our messaging and conversation about what to do,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who coordinated pandemic preparedness for the Health and Human Services Department during the Obama administration and served as a public health adviser to Biden’s campaign.
Starting back in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, Klain was part of a tight circle of longtime Biden allies briefing the then-candidate multiple times a week on the pandemic’s progress and advising the policy team as it put together plans on testing, contact tracing, production of protective equipment and preparations to distribute a vaccine. He also served as the public face for Biden’s strategy — standing before a whiteboard in a series of viral campaign videos, walking viewers through his criticisms of Trump’s pandemic response and explaining what Biden would do differently.
Klain is one of a number of people Biden has tapped for his administration whose views on battling a health crisis were shaped by what happened in 2014. At an event in Wilmington, Del. last week, Biden highlighted how his just-announced pick for Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, helped combat Ebola and Zika as part of the Obama administration. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, his pick for UN ambassador, “was our top State Department official in charge of Africa policy during the Ebola crisis,” Biden noted. And the former vice president praised Jake Sullivan, who served as his national security adviser during much of the Ebola outbreak, for “helping me develop our Covid-19 strategy.”
The coronavirus outbreak is different from Ebola in important ways. Covid-19, for instance, is spread much more easily — through tiny droplets that can hang in the air rather than direct contact with bodily fluids. And as Klain himself testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in February, “We know much less about coronavirus today than we did about Ebola in 2014.” But many of the public health, communication and government mobilization lessons Klain and his team learned then are not only applicable now; they’re also at the core of Biden’s plan for tackling the pandemic when he takes office in January.
Four, in particular, will be critical to the new president‘s — and the country’s — success in finally curbing the virus:
1. Managing the pandemic response is a full-time job.
Klain's experience coordinating the Ebola response taught him that managing a disease outbreak has to be full-time job and the person doing it has to be as close to the levers of power as possible — a model he'll bring to the Biden White House as they work to bring Covid-19 under control.
“What we learned in Ebola is that there are assets at the Defense Department, there are assets at the State Department, there are assets at Homeland Security, there are assets throughout HHS,” said Leslie Dach, the senior counselor to the secretary of Health and Human Services during the 2014 outbreak. “And we needed somebody at the White House to pull all that together.”
The lack of centralized coordination in the Trump administration, Klain said in an interview earlier this year, created “this rotating carousel of Covid coordinators” — with HHS Secretary Alex Azar, Vice President Mike Pence, coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, alternately taking control of different aspects of the pandemic and promoting competing messages and goals. All of them already had full-time jobs, Klain has noted, and none were empowered to pull together the diplomatic, economic, health and national security components of the response.
All that will change once Biden takes over, Klain pledged in his first TV appearance since being named chief of staff.
“He will have a Covid coordinator who works in the White House who has direct access to him and will be briefing him daily,” Klain told MSNBC. “The important thing is that that official will have a team of people he works with: someone coordinating vaccine distribution, someone coordinating fixing the supply chain problems we're having, someone coordinating the testing problems we were having so that we get this response where it needs to be.”
Biden’s team will soon announce who they want in this pivotal role, and is considering both Jeff Zients, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, and former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy — both of whom were closely involved in the campaign‘s and transition’s Covid-19 plans.
2. Set appropriate expectations … and let the scientists do the talking.
As they’ve forged plans for tackling Covid-19 — including the rollout of a vaccine and strategies for getting more people to wear masks — Klain and the rest of Biden’s team have focused heavily on which officials should talk about the pandemic and how they should do so.
Drawing on his experience with Ebola, Klain has urged the team to put the career federal scientists who’ve been sidelined by the Trump administration front and center, in the belief that they can help persuade a skeptical and fatigued public to rally behind the measures needed to defeat the virus.
“Our approach on H1N1 and on Ebola was to have the messaging coming from the scientific experts,” Klain told POLITICO earlier this year. “[Biden’s] view then was that information should come from medical experts so it would be seen as neutral, expert-based advice and not shaped by political considerations.”
Still, Klain stressed, there are moments when “people need to hear from your president in terms of the progress of the disease.” And in those moments, leaders need to be careful to stick to hard facts, set realistic timelines, and manage expectations on everything from a vaccine to school reopenings.
“The reality is the reality. People are experiencing it,” he said. “Trying to tell them we don’t have a Covid problem is not going to work, because people are seeing it in their own communities.”
That’s why in his speeches on Covid on the campaign trail and as president-elect, Biden has taken pains to give sober assessments of the many months left to go before a vaccine is widely available — a sharp departure from Trump’s repeated declarations over the summer that the pandemic was “rounding the corner” and a vaccine would be out by Election Day.
It’s a lesson that Biden, Klain and others learned the hard way during the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, when the Obama administration failed to meet its early promise to have 100 million vaccine doses ready by the start of flu season in October. Beset by manufacturing problems, as few as 11 million doses were available by mid-October, according to one report. And by the time production ramped up, demand for the vaccine had gone down.
Now, with vaccine hesitancy on the rise and the public deeply divided following the election, Biden adviser Jen Psaki said “the public communication portion of this” had been significantly influenced by those past experiences, with a focus on managing expectations.
“We are fully eyes-open that there needs to be a rebuilt trust in government and institutions and what is communicated to the American people, and that’s part of the discussion,” said Psaki, whom Biden has tapped to be his White House press secretary.
3. Hospitals need protective gear and federal support to handle a new disease.
Klain has said repeatedly that one of the darkest moments of the Ebola crisis came in late September 2014, when a Liberian national visiting family in the U.S. tested positive for the virus at a hospital in Dallas and two nurses subsequently became infected, setting off a wave of public hysteria and fears of a widespread outbreak.
“Confusion and a lack of preparation led to missteps when the first case of Ebola arrived in Dallas,” Klain told a House committee earlier this year.
A National Security Council report in 2016 went into greater detail, outlining the “oversights in personal protective equipment use, disinfection, the collection, transport, and disposal of hazardous waste, the provision of social services for those placed under quarantine, and post-event monitoring and travel restrictions for potentially exposed health workers” that characterized the Dallas scare.
Working with several different government agencies, Klain implemented plans to create a network of hospitals where health workers were trained and properly equipped to test for Ebola, treat infected patients and safely transport serious cases.
“Somebody who got sick could go into an assessment center and somebody there would quickly ascertain whether they had Ebola or not and would make sure that nobody else was infected while that process was going on,” said Dach, who worked with Klain on the hospital network plan in 2014 and now serves as chairman of the health advocacy group Protect Our Care. “It was a very rigorous process and Ron was very hands on, working with us at HHS.”
Some of the same shortages of protective gear and federal resources for medical workers have plagued the Covid-19 response, and Biden’s team has made eradicating these issues a top priority.
The president-elect told a group of front-line health care workers in a virtual meeting on Nov. 18 that he planned to use the Defense Production Act to produce enough masks, gloves and gowns to ensure that medical providers and other front-line workers are protected. He also said he would implement and enforce paid sick days to allow infected workers to recover, and push Congress to approve adequate funding for hospitals and state health departments.
“It’s not enough to praise you,” he told the group. “We have to protect you.”
4. A global pandemic demands a global response.
Biden’s pledge to rejoin the World Health Organization on his first day in office can be traced directly to what his team learned from the Ebola outbreak, when the success of protecting Americans from the disease depended on working with international bodies and heads of state to stamp out the virus where it originated.
“This is not just a domestic issue,” Psaki said Wednesday. “It’s also an international issue, and there needs to be coordination across the national security and domestic teams. ... Certainly, that was the case with Ebola.”
It’s the subject of some of the very first meetings the transition team is holding with federal agencies, Psaki added.
Dr. Celine Gounder, an epidemiologist who volunteered as an Ebola aid worker in Guinea in 2015 and is now serving as a member of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, said she expected that same philosophy to infuse the Biden administration’s vaccine distribution plans.
While Trump moved to cut off funding for the WHO’s vaccine development and distribution work and has pushed for Americans to be first in line for the shots — even though Pfizer’s vaccine was created by German scientists — Gounder says Biden’s views are shaped by an understanding that “we’re not an island.”
"If anything, March and April taught us that supply chains are not just in the U.S.," she said. "If we withhold access to vaccines, they may withhold access to other critical supplies — for example, gloves and masks and so on. We do have to work with others.”
Biden himself emphasized the parallel last week, in a statement pledging to reinvest in the Global Health Security Agenda that was first set up during the Obama administration and that has had its funding slashed under the Trump administration.
“Whether it’s Ebola or COVID-19, diseases do not respect borders, and the capacity to fight them must be strong, resilient, and accessible the world over,” Biden said in a statement.
End this pandemic, prevent the next one.
Despite some missteps that Klain and others have openly acknowledged, his and his team’s efforts in 2014 calmed the public panic and squashed the Ebola outbreak with only a single fatality on U.S. soil. Now, as he rejoins the White House, he faces a far more daunting challenge with Covid-19, which has killed more than 265,000 Americans and infected more than 13 million, with a widely available vaccine still months away. Still, those who worked with Klain on Ebola say they believe he can actually "turn the corner" on the pandemic the way Trump has been promising since March.
“I literally sleep easier at night knowing that Ron Klain will be part of the administration’s response,” former CDC Director Tom Frieden, who worked on the Ebola response, said in an interview.
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The rising economic power of women in this country is one of the most significant financial shifts of recent decades. The bottom line: Women are generating and managing an increasing amount of wealth in the U.S.
Today, women control more than $10 trillion (about 33%) of total U.S. household financial assets. Meanwhile, an unprecedented amount of assets will shift into the hands of U.S. women over the next three to five years, representing $30 trillion by the end of the decade. Why? Because as men pass away, they will leave control of these assets to their female spouses, who tend to be both younger and to live longer.
This is a wealth transfer of such magnitude that it approaches the annual gross domestic product of the U.S.
"This is a huge transfer of wealth in and of itself but, because women traditionally outlive men, women stand to inherit most of it," said certified financial planner Marguerita Cheng, CEO of Blue Ocean Global Wealth in Gaithersburg, Maryland. "As more and more women have a say in significant financial decisions, it's easy to see they're not adhering to business as usual."
If you are a brand-name consumer products company, a financial services company, or are in the business of selling real estate, for example, women will be making the majority of these decisions in the years ahead. So attracting and retaining female customers will be a critical growth imperative for your business. To succeed, business of all types will need to truly understand women's needs, preferences and behaviors when it comes to spending and managing their money.
Women continue to make more financial decisions on behalf of the household and more women are also turning to the investing decisions. In fact, women are leading the field when it comes to Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance investing, according to a recent article in Fortune magazine.
In general, a higher percentage of women are interested in ESG investing than men, says CFP Cathy Curtis, CEO of Curtis Financial Planning in Oakland, California. A Calvert/Investment News study showed that usage of ESG funds are up 25% year over year and the trend of ESG investing is more pronounced in women, with 53% doing so currently.
"The Covid-19 pandemic has spotlighted our financial and health-care systems' inequities as more disadvantaged and poor people are losing their jobs and lives," Curtis said. "As a result, where the environment was the main focus of ESG investors, social and governance have become critical and are driving the inflows into ESG products.
"As women inherit more wealth from their parents and spouses and sometimes make the investment decisions for the first time in their lives, I predict more money will flow into ESG and Impact investments," she added.
So, with women making financial choices that have a long-term impact on society, the environment and overall business performance, small businesses and major corporations will need to step up and find ways to support social issues such as climate change, racial and gender inequality, and social justice.
Businesses that prepare for the transition of wealth to women could see four-times faster revenue growth, according to a McKinsey & Co. report.
"It will require businesses to understand a woman's needs, preferences and behaviors when it comes to managing their finances, which I'm not sure they're ready for," Cheng said.
In general, women are not only providing to the household income, they are also responsible for managing the money and making a majority of the financial decisions.
To that point, nearly 9 in 10 women who are married or live with a partner said they are involved in spending and investing decisions in their household, up from just 42% in 2012, according to a recent report from Hearts & Wallets, a consumer research firm.
Studies have confirmed that women approach wealth management differently than men. They tend to be less risk-tolerant and more focused on life goals.
The times are changing. As wealth begins to move into the hands of women, financial services firms and businesses overall will need to commit and adapt to find ways to better meet the needs of female clients and consumers.
