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Democratic presidents tend to preside over better economies than Republican ones, but that may be down to pure luck, according to a recent paper from Alan Blinder and Mark Watson at Princeton. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. economy has grown at an average real rate of 4.35% under Democratic presidents and only 2.54% under Republicans. So what gives? "Democrats would no doubt like to attribute the large D-R growth gap to better macroeconomic policies, but the data do not support such a claim," they write. "It seems we must look instead to several variables that are mostly 'good luck.'" Three factors can explain 46-62% of the growth gap, according to the paper. Here are the reasons (via James Hamilton): Oil shocks. With the exception of Jimmy Carter, oil price shocks tend to dog Republican administrations more. The 1956-57 Suez Crisis, early-70s OPEC embargo, 1980 Iran-Iraq War, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 all happened during Republican administrations. Productivity. It's hard to say that a U.S. president is responsible here, but Democrats tend to see bigger gains in productivity. Bill Clinton, for example, enjoyed a big boost in U.S. productivity during the 1990s. Consumer confidence. Consumers tend to have a rosier outlook on the U.S. economy in the first year a Democrat is in the White House. "Yet the superior growth record under Democrats is not forecastable by standard techniques, which means it cannot be attributed to superior initial conditions," they write. Chalk this one up to luck again, but it does come "tantalizingly close to a self-fulfilling prophecy in which consumers correctly expect the economy to do better under Democrats, then make that happen by purchasing more consumer durables."

Förbereda för pensionering är svårt nog när två människor i det tillsammans. När du är på din egen, kan det vara ännu svårare. Många amerikaner kommer att leda till pensionering solo av olika anledningar, naturligtvis inklusive döden av en make, skilsmässa och förändrade livsstilar. I den 2013 US Census var cirka 54% av kvinnorna 65 eller över ogifta, och 27% av männen. Det är en massa människor, och deras situationer varierar kraftigt. Men något äldre singlar tenderar att ha gemensamma finansiella rådgivare säga, är att deras pensionering planering behov kan vara mycket olika från de av gift kamrater - och att många av dem är oförberedd. I själva verket säger en studie av Rand Corp att enstaka personer är mycket större risk att inte spara tillräckligt för Pension än gifta par. Studien av forskare Michael Hurd och Susann Rohwedder, funnit att 20% av gifta par kommer inte att spara tillräckligt för pensionering, men att vissa 35 procent av ensamstående män och 49 procent av ensamstående kvinnor kommer in pension ekonomiskt oförberedda. Fortsätt läsa

McAfee report paints grim picture of lucrative industry, despite incomplete data. Cybercrime could be costing the global economy as much as $575 billion annually, according to a new report from McAfee. The Intel-owned security company based its estimate on a range of sources, from government agencies to NGOs and academic institutions, counting both direct and indirect costs. The report, Estimating the Global Cost of Cybercrime explained the methodology as follows: "This study assumes that the cost of cybercrime is a constant share of national income, adjusted for levels of development. We calculated the likely global cost by looking at publically available data from individual countries, buttressed by interviews with government officials and experts. We looked for confirming evidence for these numbers by looking at data on IP theft, fraud, or recovery costs. In addition to a mass of anecdotes, we ultimately found aggregate data for 51 countries in all regions of the world who account for 80% of global income. We used this data to estimate the global cost, adjusting for differences among regions." However, the vendor cautioned that "differences in the thoroughness of national accounting", as well as underreporting of incidents and the difficulty of valuing IP all make calculations an imprecise art. High income countries lost more as a percentage of GDP, which could be because they have better accounting systems in place and/or that their IP is more valuable and therefore a bigger target for criminals. The $575bn figure therefore comes from extrapolating a global total from high loss countries. It could be as low as $375bn if McAfee had extrapolated from "all countries where we could find open source data".