FICRY

SmartMoney.com reports that those cheated out of their cash by Ponzi schemers will get a tax break, small consolation. The IRS will allow victims to treat losses as a “tax-favored ordinary loss” rather than a “capital loss.” The latter classification punishes bad investments by limiting deductions to the extent of capital gains for the year; [...]

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 [...]

While some on Capitol Hill will use this month’s slight drop in unemployment rate as evidence of the stimulus’ slow but steady success, their excitement may be overlooking a couple of key statistical details. First of all, while the rate of job loss has decreased from 9.5 to 9.4%, the number of unemployed Americans is [...]

By Andrew Otton, Featured Contributor, FICRY.com: To say many Americans are felling stressed and anxious about the FICRY takes no stretch of the imagination. So how are people coping? Well, many are probably calling a couple of their buddies, making sure there is cookie dough in the refrigerator, and lighting up their favorite bong. Although [...]

Chief U.S. Economist at Morgan Stanley Richard Berner offers his view on the effects of the current fiscal policy and our pricey deficit spending, and the prognosis does not look good. He writes “Depending on policy actions taken now and over the next few years, federal deficits will likely average as much as 6% of [...]

The following article,The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders Are Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution, was written by Matt Taibbi in March of 2009.

It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who [...]

Out of ABC News comes the report that in the face of declining monthly web traffic, the Obama administration may spend as much as $18 million on a redesign of Recovery.gov, the website intended to map the road out of recession. But the mind-bogglingly high pricetag has left some politicians shaking their heads—and some web [...]

A recent report from the  Rockefeller Institute  of Government  reveals a 11 percent decrease in state tax collection across the country. This steep decline is obviously a detriment to  local government budgets and their citizens.  As nytimes.com reports “All the major sources of state tax revenue — sales taxes, personal income taxes and corporate income [...]

In this financial climate, woeful tales of businesses going bust have come to grace the front pages of our newspapers and the homepages of our blogs almost every day (at least when Michael Jackson isn’t dying). But here’s one that seems positively surreal, almost as if it came to us straight out of a Depression-era [...]

In today’s financial crisis, 1 in every 9 Americans are feeding their families with stamps. There are currently 33.8 million Americans on food stamps– a number that far exceeds the the surge in food stamp users in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. In the past year, family participation in the food stamp program has increased [...]