Philipp Hildebrand, vice chairman of BlackRock.

Photo by Tolga Akmen-WPA Pool/Getty Images)

• Investors are wrong to think central banks will ease up on rate hikes, a top BlackRock exec said.
• Policymakers want to make sure people’s inflation expectations don’t rise, Philipp Hildebrand said. 
• “At best, we’re going to see some sort of pause, but not yet,” the BlackRock vice chairman said. 

Investors are wrong to think central banks will start pulling back from interest-rate hikes this year, because controlling inflation is still very much in focus, according to BlackRock’s vice chairman. 

“I think central banks are going to continue on their tightening path. They’re going to be very careful, very focused on not losing the long-term inflation-expectation anchor,” Philipp Hildebrand said in a Bloomberg interview Monday at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 

“I don’t think we’re going to see any chances, frankly, of easing, this year. I think the market has that wrong,” the former head of the Swiss central bank added.

In the US, stocks have started the year on a firm footing despite warnings about an imminent recession, with the benchmark S&P 500 up just over 4% year-to-date. Analysts say cooling inflation is giving investors confidence the Fed could pull back on its interest rate rises, while low unemployment and China’s reopening of its economy are also spurring optimism.

But if people expect inflation to increase, that can spur workers to demand higher wages, and businesses to raise prices in anticipation of rising costs. Those behaviors can kickstart a wage-price spiral, making inflation a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Global central banks raised interest rates throughout much of 2022 as inflation spiked thanks to the impact of COVID-19 and Russia’s war with Ukraine. In the US, the Federal Reserve raised the benchmark interest rate by more than 400 basis points last year in a desperate attempt to rein in inflation that hit 40-year highs. 

The Fed’s aggressive monetary policy appears to have worked, given consumer price pressures have steadily declined since mid-2022. The US annual rate for December came in at 6.5%, compared with around 9% in June.

According to Hildebrand, inflation has peaked and is likely to drop further and faster. “I think inflation is going to drop very quickly. In fact, I believe many of us will be surprised at how quickly it will fall,” he said. 

Still, investors anticipating a Fed “pivot” — a reversal of its rate-hike campaign — are far too optimistic, Hildebrand said.

“If you’re the central banks, you’re going to want to make sure you get this done, that you don’t risk resurging inflation expectations further down the road.” 

“At best we’re going to see some sort of pause, but not yet,” he said. 

POKHARA, Nepal — Nepalese authorities on Tuesday began returning to families the bodies of plane crash victims and were sending the aircraft’s data recorder to France for analysis as they try to determine what caused the country’s deadliest air accident in 30 years.

The flight plummeted into a gorge on Sunday while on approach to the newly opened Pokhara International Airport in the foothills of the Himalayas, killing at least 70 of the 72 people aboard. Searchers found the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder on Monday, and combed through debris scattered down the 300-meter-deep (984-foot-deep) ravine in search of the two missing, who are presumed dead. One body was found earlier Tuesday.

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The voice recorder would be analyzed locally, but the flight data recorder would be sent to France, said Jagannath Niraula, spokesperson for Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority. The aircraft’s manufacturer, ATR, is headquartered in Toulouse.

The French air accident investigations agency confirmed it is taking part in the investigation, and its representatives were already on site.

The twin-engine ATR 72-500t, operated by Nepal’s Yeti Airlines, was completing the 27-minute flight from the capital, Kathmandu, to the resort city of Pokhara, 200 kilometers (125 miles) west.

It’s still not clear what caused the crash, less than a minute’s flight from the airport in light wind and clear skies.

Aviation experts say it appears that the turboprop went into a stall at low altitude on approach to the airport, but it is not clear why.

From a smartphone video shot from the ground seconds before the aircraft crashed, one can see the ATR 72 “nose high, high angle of attack, with wings at a very high bank angle, close to the ground,” said Bob Mann, an aviation analyst and consultant.

“Whether that was due to loss of power, or misjudging aircraft’s energy, direction or the approach profile, and attempting to modify energy or approach, that aircraft attitude would likely have resulted in an aerodynamic stall and rapid loss of altitude, when already close to the ground,” he said in an email.

The aircraft was carrying 68 passengers, including 15 foreign nationals and four crew members. The foreigners included five Indians, four Russians, two South Koreans, and one each from Ireland, Australia, Argentina and France. Pokhara is the gateway to the Annapurna Circuit, a popular hiking trail in the Himalayas.

On Tuesday afternoon, over 150 people gathered at Tulsi Ghat, a cremation ground on the banks of the Seti River in Pokhara, to mourn Tribhuwan Paudel, a 37-year-old journalist and editor at a local newspaper, who died in the crash. As a priest lit the funeral pyre, close friends of Paudel came together to reminisce.

Rishikanta Paudel said Paudel always celebrated his successes. “He would cry with happiness whenever I did something good … I still feel like he might call me any time now and ask how I am.”

Bimala Bhandari, the chairperson for the Federation of Nepali Journalists in Kaski district, described Paudel as driven and passionate about the development of Pokhara.

“He was dearest to all journalists here because of his nature,” said Badri Binod Pratik, a friend and journalist who taught Paudel. “The accident has taken him away from us … I am crumbling since the day of the crash.”

Funerals for other victims, many of whom were from the area, are expected in the coming days. They include a pharmaceutical marketing agent who was traveling to be with his sister as she gave birth, and a minister of a South Korean religious group who was going to visit the school he founded.

On Monday evening, hundreds of relatives and friends were still gathered outside a local hospital. Many consoled each other, while some shouted at officials to speed up the post mortems so they could take the bodies of their loved ones home for funerals.

Aviation expert Patrick Smith, who flies Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft and writes a column called “Ask the Pilot,” cautioned that a lot of details are still not known about the crash, but said that the plane “appears to have succumbed to a loss of control at low altitude.”

“One possibility is a botched response to an engine failure,” he told The Associated Press in an e-mail.

The man who shot the smartphone footage of the plane’s descent said it looked like a normal landing until the plane suddenly veered to the left.

“I saw that and I was shocked … I thought that today everything will be finished here after it crashes, I will also be dead,” said Diwas Bohora.

The type of plane involved, the ATR 72, has been used by airlines around the world for short regional flights since the late 1980s. Introduced by a French and Italian partnership, the aircraft model has been involved in several deadly accidents over the years. In Taiwan, two accidents involving ATR 72-500 and ATR 72-600 aircrafts in 2014 and 2015 led to the planes being grounded for a period.

Nepal, home to eight of the world’s 14 highest mountains including Mount Everest, has a history of air crashes. Sunday’s crash is Nepal’s deadliest since 1992, when all 167 people aboard a Pakistan International Airlines plane were killed when it plowed into a hill as it tried to land in Kathmandu.

According to the Flight Safety Foundation’s Aviation Safety database, there have been 42 fatal plane crashes in Nepal since 1946.

The European Union has banned airlines from Nepal from flying into the 27-nation bloc since 2013, citing weak safety standards. In 2017, the International Civil Aviation Organization cited improvements in Nepal’s aviation sector, but the EU continues to demand administrative reforms.

— Pathi reported from New Delhi. Associated Press writers David Rising in Bangkok and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.

Harry Li is conflicted. Ideally, the law student wants to spend the Lunar New Year holiday in his home village in northern China’s Hebei province, but he is afraid of spending more than 12 hours on crowded trains and buses lest he brings COVID-19 to his elderly parents, who have not been vaccinated. “It’s been three years since I’ve been home [for Lunar New Year],” says Li, 20, who studies some 700 miles from home in Shanghai. “I was vaccinated nine months ago but everyone around me is still getting sick.”

This week, millions of Chinese face a similar conundrum. Before the pandemic, China’s Lunar New Year holiday was renowned as humanity’s largest annual migration, when hundreds of millions of working age people travel from jobs typically on China’s freewheeling coast back to ancestral villages to feast and toast with elderly kin. During the pandemic, strict controls and state-led incentivization schemes—comprising cash, shopping vouchers, and movie tickets—put the brakes on holiday travel. But, on Dec. 9, China began completely dismantling its testing and quarantine apparatus, allowing the virus to spread like wildfire across the world’s largest population of 1.3 billion.

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Officials, who have stopped counting infections, said on Saturday that nearly 60,000 people with COVID-19 died between Dec. 8 and Jan. 12. Still, that figure is believed to be a gross undercount due to strict new reporting criteria that only include victims who died in hospital following a pneumonia diagnosis and exclude all those with underlying health conditions. Meanwhile, social media images of crowded hospital wards, overflowing morgues, and long queues outside crematoriums and funeral parlors point to a burgeoning health crisis. Around 900 million people in China had been infected as of Jan. 11, according to a study by Peking University, amounting to some 64% of the population. Projections for the final death toll range from one million to over two.

On Saturday, Jiao Yahui, chief of the medical administration bureau of China’s National Health Commission, announced that the “national emergency peak has passed.” But Yanzhong Huang, a public health expert at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, says that any estimates should be taken “with a grain of salt.” He says some local governments may be incentivized to announce higher infection rates to shift their focus onto economic recovery as soon as possible. “With the dismantling of the testing regime, they cannot be expected to provide accurate information.”

Much hinges on what unfolds this week. Lunar New Year officially begins Sunday but for many the grand peregrination has already begun. The combination of millions of people crammed onto public transport traveling to a predominately elderly, under-vaccinated population in villages with rudimentary healthcare threatens to be a perfect storm. Zeng Guang, ex-head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control, has warned that it is “time to focus on the rural areas.” Meanwhile, Prof. Guo Jianwen, a member of the State Council’s pandemic prevention team, urged people “don’t go home to visit” elderly relatives if they had not yet been infected. “You have all kinds of ways to show you care; you don’t necessarily have to bring the virus to their home.”

Liu Lei—Xinhua/Getty ImagesDecorations adorn the Fuxing bullet train G2457, which travels from Beijing to Hohhot, at Hohhot East Railway Station in Hohhot, Jan. 14, 2023.

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It’s another example of China’s chaotic reopening since a spate of anti-lockdown protests that erupted across the country in early November spooked the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Maintaining zero-COVID required diverting legions of doctors and nurses from their specialties into the mind-numbing task of conducting billions upon billions of PCR tests, while vaccinations were sadly an afterthought, not least since jingoistic propaganda lorded the state’s success banishing the virus. As of Dec. 14, only 42% of over-80s had received three doses of a vaccine, according to government figures.

Worryingly, those figures are also heavily skewed towards elderly living in cities, meaning those awaiting the Lunar New Year arrival of sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, are disproportionately vulnerable. While precise figures for rural COVID vaccine uptake are difficult to find, annual flu vaccination rates are typically 1.1% in China’s villages compared to 2-3% in cities, says Xi Chen, a professor of public health and economics at Yale. “It’s a problem of supply and also demand,” he says.

Despite significant strides reforming China’s health system, coverage remains uneven, and village dwellers will often travel several hours to the nearest big city to seek medical care rather than visit poorly funded neighborhood clinics. Since publishing its latest health-reform plan in 2016, China has spent billions on improving community-level facilities in the knowledge that an effective primary-care system reduces the strain on urban hospitals. Yet it’s a work in progress that has been stalled by the tremendous burden of lockdown measures.

After three years of shelling out for testing and quarantine measures, local health authorities are broke. The testing regime alone was costing up to $250 billion per year, or 9% of China’s 2021 fiscal income, according to Dongwu Securities. Local governments have admitted that funds allocated for poverty alleviation and infrastructure had to be diverted to finance mass testing. In September, the nation’s main testing firms were complaining about billions of dollars in unpaid debts. By early November, local authorities began charging the public for the PCR tests they were obliged to take every day or few days.

The financial crunch was another driver to finally jettison zero-COVID. For the first two years of the pandemic, the policy kept China the best performing of any major economy. But that all changed with the onerous lockdowns of 2022 spurred by the hyper-transmissible Omicron variant. China’s economy grew by only 3% in 2022, it was announced Tuesday, its lowest rate in decades and missing Beijing’s comparatively modest target of 5.5%.

Dismantling zero-COVID was seen as key to driving domestic consumption, which still lags given trepidation over slumped real estate and stock markets as well as declining exports. But according to Vincent Brussee, an analyst for the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies, reopening may be a “precondition” but isn’t “sufficient” to boost consumption alone. “Things like social security, labor rights for especially migrant workers, are also important,” says Brussee. “At the moment, if you live in China, it’s almost a necessity to save a lot of money.”

The grim irony is that China’s chaotic reopening has only reinforced that fact. While ordinary people are now saved the expense of constant PCR tests, many are scrambling to buy antiviral medication on the black market, pay for hospital beds, or afford inflated crematorium costs to bury relatives. A limited social safety net stymies the urge to splash out. And with local coffers nearing empty, that situation is not likely to change soon, not least since China’s leader has hardly set a glowing example.

Despite Xi Jinping insisting in his new year’s address that the CCP has “put life first all along,” it has emerged that China is refusing to pay even the reduced price that multinational biotech firm Pfizer charges lower middle-income countries for its effective antiviral Paxlovid. “They are the second highest economy in the world and I don’t think that they should pay less than El Salvador,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said Jan. 10.

Instead, Lunar New Year migrants will have to take responsibility for themselves. Prof. Chen advises travelers to get a booster and bring fever and cough medication to their villages, and even pulse oximeters that measure blood oxygen levels and can indicate when cases are becoming acute. “This year’s migration is unstoppable,” says Prof. Chen. “But it’s never too late to flatten the curve.”

—With reporting by Amy Gunia/Hong Kong.

A slim Republican majority and a speaker of the House weakened by concessions made to anti-establishment conservatives could give Democrats an opening to push through immigration reform this year, senior Republican aides and left-wing immigration activists told the Washington Free Beacon.

House Democrats could force a vote on a bill giving citizenship to “dreamers”—illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as children—residency to millions of illegal immigrants, an expansion of work visas for foreigners, and other wish-list items using a parliamentary maneuver called a discharge petition. In other words, House Democrats could make an alliance with just five moderate Republicans and pass the first major piece of immigration reform since 2000.

This would be a nightmare scenario for border hawks and Republicans who campaigned against President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, which they blame for the millions of illegal crossings on the southern border since he took office. Left-wing activists are pushing for such a scenario and see the discharge petition as a way to get a more radical bill than should be possible in a Republican-controlled House. Some border hawks and senior Republican staffers see that outcome as a distinct possibility, citing anger from the Democratic base and a push from business groups.

“It’s totally possible. Current House GOP immigration plans don’t have broad buy-in from the rest of the party right now anyway,” a senior Republican aide told the Free Beacon. “The chances only increase if the Supreme Court rules against Biden on Title 42 and [the DREAMer program].”

Should the House pass an immigration reform bill, Senate Democrats, who hold a majority, could change filibuster rules—or find nine Republicans who support the law as they did with a number of bills since 2021, including the Respect for Marriage Act and the infrastructure law—and send it to Biden’s desk.

House Republicans are divided on how to best tackle immigration reform. Texas Republicans unveiled a framework in December focused on building a border wall and enhancing domestic enforcement. That plan, Republican sources told the Free Beacon, is unlikely to pass.

But passing an amnesty bill through the House would only require a buy-in from five House Republicans. A few dozen moderate Republicans have already signaled openness to working with Democrats on immigration reform by signing on to narrowly tailored amnesty bills in 2021. A discharge petition would allow a bill to move to the floor for a vote after 218 members sign on in favor, bypassing the traditional route where House leadership and the Rules Committee control which legislation comes up for a vote and when.

This scenario played out in 2018, when over a dozen Republican moderates signed on to a discharge petition to override Republican leadership and force votes on immigration, including bills to prevent the deportation of illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as children.

Then-speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) managed to curb the rebellion by promising a vote on compromise legislation hashed out within the party. That bill failed after it was voted down by half the Republican caucus and every House Democrat. Compromise legislation would be more difficult for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), who has less control over which bills make it to a floor vote after giving immigration hardliners on the House Freedom Caucus seats on the House Rules Committee, where they can effectively block bills from being considered.

A number of House Republicans have shown openness to working with Democrats on immigration amnesty issues. In 2021, 9 Republicans voted in favor of the American Dream and Promise Act and 30 voted for the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, both Democratic-sponsored bills that provided pathways to citizenship for immigrants in the United States illegally. Both bills ultimately died in the Senate.

Immigration activists who spoke with the Free Beacon supported the idea of using a discharge petition to force through immigration reform. Lydia Guzman, who works as the director of advocacy and civic engagement at the left-wing pro-immigration group League of United Latin American Citizens, said her organization plans on pressuring both Republicans and Democrats to reach a deal in the new Congress.

“[A discharge petition] is on our radar, and we’re glad to see that Republicans are looking at immigration reform seriously. I think this is a golden opportunity for them to be leaders on this,” Guzman told the Free Beacon. “We have been pushing and have been advocating for reforms for decades. We can accomplish this.”

If Senate Dems can’t get enough Republicans on board, they could also modify the filibuster to get the bill past the finish line. One Democrat seen as a key vote to change the procedure, Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.), has said he’d be willing to make it so senators must speak for the length of the filibuster on the floor. Such a change would allow bills to pass with a simple majority after all opposing lawmakers finish their remarks.

Manchin has also said Republicans and Democrats must work together on immigration reform as recently as December. In an interview with CBS, he said “West Virginia needs more workers” and called on the Senate to work on a bill.

Around the same time as those remarks, reports surfaced that some Senate Republicans were working on an immigration deal with Democrats. According to the Washington Post, Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) was working with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) on a bill that would offer a pathway to citizenship for two million “dreamers.”

RJ Hauman, lead lobbyist with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that advocates for restrictions on illegal immigration, said his group is “a bit concerned with the threat of amnesty due to a slim [Republican] majority and a more open floor process.”

But he added that “Democrat extremism on the immigration issue could be a saving grace,” arguing that many Democrats are likely to object to a bill that includes border security provisions supported by Republicans.

“There is zero chance that the entire Democratic caucus would unite behind a discharge petition that contains any border security provisions—even if a mass amnesty is included,” said Hauman. “There are some Republicans like Rep. [Maria] Salazar [of Florida] who relish the idea of amnesty, but even they recognize that border security is the top priority right now.”

The post ‘It’s Totally Possible’: How Dems Could Push Immigration Reform Through a GOP-Controlled House appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

President Joe Biden passed up a chance last week to press his Mexican counterpart about the unprecedented border crisis and escalating cartel violence. Instead, he chose to discuss “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “climate change” initiatives.

One day after Biden’s Jan. 9 sitdown with Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the White House released a list of six “commitments” secured through the meeting. At the top of that list is a pledge to advance “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” with Biden and López Obrador vowing to “promote racial justice,” “expand protections for LGBTQI+ individuals,” and “foster Indigenous-led growth.” Second on the list is a commitment to “tackle the climate crisis” and implement “ambitious cuts to emissions.”  National security and immigration, however, ranked much lower—Biden listed those issues last and third to last, respectively.

Biden’s decision to place equity at the forefront of his Mexico meeting came amid an ongoing crisis at the southern border, and one Republican lawmaker told the Washington Free Beacon Biden’s focus on diversity is unserious. Illegal immigration soared to record levels last year, with migrant apprehensions topping 2.3 million, a 37 percent increase from the 1.7 million seen in 2021. The American people, meanwhile, want action on the border: 54 percent of midterm voters identified immigration as a “very important” issue, a November Pew Research Center poll found, compared with just 34 percent and 38 percent who identified racial issues and climate change, respectively. Still, immigration went “largely unaddressed” during Biden’s meeting with López Obrador, Bloomberg reported, because the two sides “ran out of time.”

Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.), who last week urged Biden to use the Mexico meeting to “take serious steps to secure our border,” called the Democrat’s focus on diversity “ridiculous.” Waltz highlighted the wave of cartel violence seen across Mexico prior to Biden’s visit, violence that the Republican says will only expedite the flow of drugs into the United States as the Mexican Army takes “dozens of casualties per week.”

“Our border is being controlled by the cartels, and the Biden administration clearly doesn’t want to deal with it in a serious way,” Waltz told the Free Beacon. “It’s disappointing and a huge missed opportunity.”

The White House did not return a request for comment.

While Biden did touch on immigration and national security at the bottom of his commitment list, neither section is likely to satisfy border hawks. That’s because Biden’s immigration section, which is titled “Migration and Development,” does not mention border security. Instead, it pledges to “address the root causes of irregular migration and forced displacement” and collaborate with Mexico to “counter xenophobia and discrimination against migrants and refugees.” Biden’s “Regional Security” section, meanwhile, includes a commitment to “integrate a gender perspective” into the United States’ and Mexico’s response to natural disasters, given the “differentiated impact disasters have on women and girls.”

The Biden administration’s focus on diversity while in Mexico went beyond the White House. On Jan. 10, Biden’s State Department issued a “Declaration on the North American Partnership for Equity and Racial Justice,” which saw secretaries of state from the United States, Mexico, and Canada declare their commitment to “affirmatively advance equity and racial justice,” “engage communities with lived experience of racism and discrimination,” and “reflect the diversity of our nations in our federal public services workforce.”

The post In Mexico Relationship, Biden Prioritizes ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ Over Immigration and National Security appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Asking for a reduced schedule might not hurt your career in the long term — as long as you go about it smartly.

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• Insider’s latest work-advice column is about a mom who wants to go down to a four-day workweek.
• She worries she’ll regret not spending enough time with her kids but also fears for her career.
• Both concerns are legitimate. Here’s what a Stanford labor economist advises.

I’m a senior leader in my company and a mother to three youngish kids. I love my job, but I’m struggling with the push-pull between work and home. I feel like I’m missing my kids’ lives and I don’t want to have any regrets on my deathbed. 

I’m considering asking my boss if I can work four days a week. I can technically afford it — though making 20% less would put a dent in my family’s budget, but the idea of having an extra day to just be a mom and get stuff done at home sounds blissful. 

But I also worry, is it career suicide? My boss is a workaholic. I’m afraid she’d be supportive to my face, but mentally write me off. I really wanna keep my career going, and I have aspirations of moving onto something bigger and better in the future. Would that be an option if I worked four days?

I don’t know how to begin to make this decision. What should I do?

 

Navigating the demands of a full-time job and parenthood is not easy.

Indeed, many working parents, myself included, wrestle with the same challenges you’re describing, perhaps more so now than ever. The pandemic has served as a potent reminder that life is short, and it’s prompted many people to reconsider their lives and careers. Some are making big changes when they realize that what they have is not what they want.

It makes sense that you want to ask your boss about moving to a four-day workweek to maintain your mental well-being and spend more time with your kids. Your efforts to ward off “deathbed regrets” are real. Then again, your concerns that the request might hurt your professional prospects are also real: Research suggests that colleagues and managers tend to view mothers and pregnant women as less competent and less committed to their jobs, in what’s known as maternal-wall bias.

So how do you decide whether to raise the topic with your boss? And if you go for it, how do you ask? For answers, I talked to Myra Strober, a labor economist and professor emeritus at Stanford University who’s cowritten a new book called “Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions.”

Strober says it depends on where you are in your professional life and your tenure at the company. If you’re in the early stages of your career or relatively new to the organization, your bargaining power is rather weak. You haven’t built up enough credibility, and your request is unlikely to get approved. 

In that case, she suggests easing some burdens at home to stay clear-headed on the job. You could, for instance, use some of the 20% of your salary you’re not losing to outsource food shopping, cleaning, or tutoring. And talk to your partner, if you have one, and your kids, if they’re old enough, about doing more around the house. 

But if you’ve been at the company for several years, are a tried-and-true member of the team, and are already well thought of, you have a greater chance of being successful. And asking for a reduced schedule might not hurt your career in the long term — as long as you go about it smartly.

Strober recommends drawing up a one-pager that details how everything you do at work will still get done. You can’t do it all yourself, of course, so you need to explain how your duties will be distributed. Your salary cut could allow the company to sprinkle around those funds to others, for instance.

Second, demonstrate your flexibility. If your boss needs you to work on a Friday when you’re supposed to be off, you should be willing to do that, Strober says. (Bear in mind, though, that if you come in on the occasional Friday, it’s unlikely you’ll be paid, so you must be really and truly sure you can manage on 80% of your income.) 

Indicate, too, that the new schedule isn’t permanent. You might say you plan to do this for a year or that you and your boss can revisit the arrangement within three months. 

How you broach the subject with your work-obsessed boss depends on your relationship.

Presumably, your supervisor knows you’re a parent and that you have a lot of responsibilities on the home front. Strober suggests saying something like, “I know that you prioritize work over just about everything. I appreciate that and I appreciate you. But that’s not in the situation I’m in right now.”

 “Sometimes workaholics are more sympathetic than you think,” she said.

Whether you decide to make the pitch to your boss is ultimately a personal decision. You need to weigh your money and career ambitions against your desires to have more time for your family. Take your time and think hard about the consequences, but also know that no decision is perfect.

Down the road, you may not be able to eliminate regret, but you can minimize it, Strober says, adding that you can remind yourself: “I did the best I could.”