Shares of Crumbs Bake Shop (CRMB), a chain of upscale bakeries, plunged more than 12% Wednesday, continuing a decline from last week, after a report in The Wall Street Journal raised questions about whether the public is suffering from "gourmet cupcake burnout."

Crumbs, which is based in New York and has 67 locations in 10 states, recently reported a fourth-quarter net loss $5.36 million, or 49 cents a share, compared with a loss of $1.76 million, or 32 cents per share, a year earlier. Sales fell 2% to $10.8 million as Superstorm Sandy took a bite out of business.

All that led Crumbs to slash its yearly sales forecast to $57 million from $73 million. It now expects a 2013 loss, excluding some costs, of $3.9 million, versus an earlier projection of a $3.2 million profit. That has pushed the stock down to $1.49, far below its 52-week high of $3.57. 

When Budweiser sales slip, it's clearly not the beer's fault: It's the cans.

Parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD) has watched Budweiser's marketplace slide for a good, long while now. In 2011, MolsonCoors' (TAP) flagship product Coors Light replaced Bud as the No. 2 beer in the country, breaking the grip A-B held on the Top 2 since 1993.

While Coors Light sales grew 9% in the five years prior, Bud sales tanked 29%. It has lost more than 60% of its sales since its 50 million-barrel peak in 1988, when it accounted for more than 25% of all beer sold in the U.S. For some perspective, Budweiser once held market share close to that now held by both Miller and Coors brands combined (27%).

 

Crikey, there's a lot of irony here.

Australian regulators have for years accused "Crocodile Dundee" star Paul Hogan of skipping out on millions in taxes. Hogan allegedly hired an adviser to help him hide that money in offshore tax havens.

Now Hogan claims the adviser has run off with $34 million he had stashed in a Swiss bank account. Hogan's lawyer sued the adviser in a California court, but the court rejected the claim in February.

The issue centers around the $34 million that has been parked for nearly 20 years at the Corner Bank in Lausanne, Switzerland. Hogan started getting nervous last year after his adviser, Philip Egglishaw, wouldn't give him any bank statements about the money, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. 

The idea that people would continue collecting public assistance even after winning a lottery strikes a nerve with many law-abiding taxpayers. Which is why many people thought it was especially galling when Michigan officials announced this week that they had found 3,500 jackpot winners either collected government benefits or lived with people who did.

Several well-publicized cases of miscreant lottery winners have galvanized state officials. For instance, Amanda Clayton of the Detroit area was caught last year collecting welfare after winning a $735,000 jackpot. She later died of a drug overdose.

So legislators enacted a law in 2012 requiring that the state match a list of people who have won $1,000 or more from the lottery with another one showing people who receive public assistance.  

Comedian Robin Williams, always good with a one-liner, once summed up his struggle with drug abuse via a punchline: "Cocaine is God's way of saying you're making too much money."

 

Well, TV's Mork may have been on to something. David Nutt, a controversial British professor, psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacol​ogist -- who was also the U.K.'s most senior government adviser on drug abuse -- believes cocaine contributed to the recent global financial crisis.

 

"Bankers use cocaine and got us into this terrible mess," he said in a recent interview with the U.K.'s Sunday Times (subscription required) -- adding that cocaine made many people in the financial sector overly confident and more open to taking additional risks.

 

Cocaine, he says, is a perfect drug for the industry's "culture of excitement and drive and more and more and more. It is a 'more' drug."

 

To libertarians wondering whether they can use bitcoins to avoid taxes, the IRS has a short, sweet answer for you: We're not sure.

Back in March, the Treasury Department issued a series of guidelines for bitcoin brokers. That guidance was more about registration requirements for brokers and money-laundering laws than it was about the tax implications of holding online currency.

But IRS spokesperson Anthony Burke told The Huffington Post that the agency hasn't yet clarified whether payments received in bitcoins should be considered barter, in-kind payments or payments in a foreign currency. Those aren't small distinctions, because each is treated differently under the tax code. There's also no sign of whether bitcoin donations to nonprofit organizations are deductible in U.S. dollars.

 

What happens when an academic study becomes so widely accepted that it forms the basis for legislative policy prescriptions that can affect an entire country -- and then is later shown to be flawed? We're about to find out.

The recent debate over what to do about the federal deficit was fueled in part by a much-cited 2010 study from respected Harvard economists Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, who argued that when a country's ratio of debt to gross domestic product reaches 90%, things go very wrong. 

According to their research, such countries can expect depressing years of stagflation (slow growth and rising prices). That prompted austerity arguments from Rep. Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin and former vice-presidential candidate, who urged drastic federal spending cuts.

 

As a general rule, faking it doesn't work. But there are exceptions.

Sometimes, an imitation product can be as good as the real thing. And in rarer cases, the knockoff is even better.

Fake tans might be the best example of a superior knockoff. Say what you want about a tan in a bottle, but sunless tanning products from Estee Lauder (EL) and other companies are far more preferable to the premature aging and skin cancer that can come from too much sun.

We asked around the moneyNOW team and found nine cases where the fake version is just as good as the original. They're usually cheaper, too, which is an added bonus.