FICRY

In the last year politicians have increasingly pushed for legislation that would limit off-shore banking. Even UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, among others has called for curbs on tax havens despite the fact that a great number of the countries that offer such tax incentives, including the Channel Islands, are British dependencies.  Their rhetoric is [...]

An investigation authored by the Associated Press has concluded that your personal information is vulnerable and unprotected every time you swipe your credit-card and wait for approval.
Sensitive, financial data, including your name and account number are “ferried” to hacker’s computers while the transactions travels from store to bank on the information superhighway, according to [...]

Cashing in as Usual: ‘Abkassieren wie immer,’ By Nikolaus Piper, translated from German to English by Daniel Howell, featured contributor and resident translator for FICRY.com.

The peak of the financial crisis may have been overcome, but the rage at bankers continues to grow. No wonder: the jugglers on the trading floors of New York, London, and [...]

AIG painted The Saint Regis red for free on the taxpayers tab. Internet tabloid gawker reports that The St. Regis Monarch Beach is part of an elaborate scam to skim bailout funds and facilitate indulgences for banking elites courtesy of the tax-payers. When AIG executives celebrated the successful procurement of government cash at the luxury [...]

Writing for The Japan Times, David Cloud, philosopher, professor at Princeton and partner in several hedge funds, maintains that to understand how we got ourselves into our current economic mess, complicated explanations about derivatives, regulatory failure, and so on, are beside the point. The best answer is both ancient and simple: hubris. The truth is [...]

So how do we get ourselves out of this crisis? If only there were a rational way. GM’s most respected market strategist, Jeremy Gantham, believes the “efficient market hypothesis” was one of the principal causes of the economic meltdown. Conceived on the chalkboards of the University of Chicago’s department of finance, the “hypothesis” suggests that [...]

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi reports that Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression. He asserts: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Goldman follows [...]

Willem Buiter touches on the state of bank lending and proposals for financial services industry supervision. Needless to say he is not optimistic about  the use of quantitative easing by many central banks.

In a move that reveals  further stress upon consumer’s ability to spend, Citi bank has upped its credit card rates. For cards associated with Sears and other retailers, the rates have reached as high as 24%. This comes as a shock: Citi group is the recipient of one of the largest sums of government bailout [...]

Bernie Madoff’s days will be forever dark, as he received the maximum prison sentence today–150 years.
Madoff dressed up today for his sentencing, clad in a white shirt, tie, and his only remaining suit, albeit, a dark one.  Bernie Madoff’s lawyers begged for a mere 12 year long sentence, citing there was a “mob vengeance” mentality [...]