Ponzi Scheme. Quotes

Social security isn’t a ponzi scheme. It’s not bankrupting us. It’s not an outrage. It is working.

The amount of sympathy you get from having an illness is paid out like a Ponzi scheme and psychiatric disorders are all the way at the bottom.

Ponzi schemes don’t trickle down, they siphon up.

Social Security is unsustainable because it is not meeting the first order condition of a Ponzi scheme, namely expanding the pool of suckers.

All ponzi schemes are upheld by a centripetal force caused by those orbiting the circles of power, celebrity and wealth and trying to get in. When the ponzi scheme reaches its point of maximum growth, the force disperses and the ponzi scheme collapses.

What is interesting is that elephants can accurately and reliably figure out who is friend and who is foe. Compare this to us humans, who still walk down dark alleys at night, fall for Ponzi schemes, and buy lemons from used-car salesmen.

Assyria soon discovered a painful truth: empires are like Ponzi schemes: financial frauds in which previous investors are paid returns out of new investors' deposits. The costs of holding imperial territory can only be underwritten by loot and tribute extracted by constant new conquests; empires must continue to expand if they are not to collapse.

Many people have made money selling magic potions and Ponzi schemes, but few have gotten rich selling the advice, “Don’t buy that stuff.

Ponzi schemes exist in stable disequilibrium. This means that while they can’t ultimately succeed, they can persist indefinitely—until they don’t.

I’m barren. I lost my uterus in a Ponzi scheme.

Good luck is a sham. The wheel of fortune is a Ponzi scheme. True success requires sacrifice.

Of all the get-rich-quick magnates that have operated, Ponzi is the king.

Ponzi austerity schemes, just like Ponzi growth schemes, necessitate a constant influx of new capital to support the illusion that bankruptcy has been averted.

From the perspective of well-being, the government’s interest in increased consumerism is largely a Ponzi scheme—it promises increased happiness but doesn’t deliver.

There are legal Ponzi schemes and illegal Ponzi schemes. Social Security is a legal Ponzi scheme, as is the stock market.

No. Here we can see why Pascal’s wager, Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, and other epistemological ponzi schemes won’t do.

Nothing was as it seemed in Leo Koretz’s make-believe world of mysterious syndicates and Panamanian oil fields. Accounts written long after his death added fresh layers of myth and distortion, but I was determined to learn the truth about a larger-than-life figure who rarely, if ever, told the truth. The real story of the man who pioneered and mastered the Ponzi scheme, is so gripping – and, at times, so incredible – that it needs no embellishment. And it’s a story woven into the fabric of the corrupt politics and gang warfare that plagued Chicago in the 1920s.

The world we live in is still mostly governed by a ponzi scheme of power, wealth and celebrity. Those at the top of the ponzi scheme are standing on nothing but the world’s acceptance of their right to be there.

Twelve cheating husbands, eleven pathological liars, ten wall street executives, nine wives lying about their spending habits, eight MLM marketers, seven elderly scammers, six catfishers, five Munchausen by proxy, four only sponsored beauty influencers, three fake Frenchmen, two dead beat dads, and the inventor of the Ponzi scheme!

His debts approached three thousand dollars and, as Ponzi liked to say, his only assets were his hopes.

When New Yorkers went to the polls a few weeks later, election officials came across the names of two unexpected write-in candidates for state treasurer: John D. Rockefeller and Charles Ponzi.

It was in Las Vegas that Eisman and his associates’ attitude toward the U.S. bond market hardened into something like its final shape. As Vinny put it, “That was the moment when we said, ‘Holy shit, this isn’t just credit. This is a fictitious Ponzi scheme.’” In Vegas the question lingering at the back of their minds ceased to be, Do these bond market people know something we do not? It was replaced by, Do they deserve merely to be fired, or should they be put in jail? Are they delusional, or do they know what they’re doing? Danny thought that the vast majority of the people in the industry were blinded by their interests and failed to see the risks they had created. Vinny, always darker, said, “There were more morons than crooks, but the crooks were higher up.

Desperate, Ponzi sent a cable to Italy appealing to the dictator Benito Mussolini. No help there either, making Ponzi one of the rare topics on which Coolidge and Mussolini agreed. Ponzi was returned to Texas to await extradition, a process

Now, through an act as simple as walking across a stage and collecting an empty plastic folder representing a degree, our stock had plummeted to nothing, the wretched leavings of some cosmic Ponzi scheme. A lifetime's worth of planning and training and delusion gone with the wind. Some of us were moving home to live free of charge in our parents' guest rooms, or if we were thin enough, heading west to try our luck in L.A.; others, to our collective horror, were being forced to work at actual jobs.

November 2, 1984 was an especially tragic day in the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/AIDS epidemic. That was the day Anthony Fauci became the Director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (NIAID). (Good Intentions p.128) It was the day a thin-skinned, physically ultra-diminutive man with a legendary Napoleonic attitude was positioned by destiny to become the de facto AIDS Czar. In the fog of culpability that constitutes what could be called "Holocaust II" one thing is clear: the buck, on its way to the very top of the government, at least pauses at the megalomaniac desk of Anthony Fauci.

If all of the account holders at Barclays Bank suddenly demand their money, Barclays will promptly collapse (unless the government steps in to save it). The same is true of Lloyds, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and all other banks in the world. It sounds like a giant Ponzi scheme, doesn’t it? But if it’s a fraud, then the entire modern economy is a fraud. The fact is, it’s not a deception, but rather a tribute to the amazing abilities of the human imagination. What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our trust in the future. This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world.

A bubble starts when any group of stocks, in this case those associated with the excitement of the Internet, begin to rise. The updraft encourages more people to buy the stocks, which causes more TV and print coverage, which causes even more people to buy, which creates big profits for early Internet stockholders. The successful investors tell you at cocktail parties how easy it is to get rich, which causes the stocks to rise further, which pulls in larger and larger groups of investors. But the whole mechanism is a kind of Ponzi scheme where more and more credulous investors must be found to buy the stock from the earlier investors. Eventually, one runs out of greater fools.

Capitalism is not the simple desire to make a profit. Capitalism is the fantasy that growth can continue at a consistent rate indefinitely. When a child is young, it cannot yet imagine being an adult, so it thinks it will keep on growing forever. The fantasy that you can grow forever is exhilarating, one of the many aspects that make children seem so alive. We live in fantasy, all of us, all of the time, to a greater or lesser extent.

A pyramid scheme is illegal and is where no product or service is sold; the business exists just to bring in recruiting fees. These still pop up from time to time and are an illegal cousin to the Ponzi or Madoff scheme because of the last-man rule. The last-man rule is, if you were to extend the company’s success until the last man on earth joined the business, would it be over because they only make money from recruiting and never the sale of a product or service? If it would, this is illegal.

Markopolos first heard about Madoff in the late 1980s. The hedge fund he worked for had noticed Madoff’s spectacular returns, and they wanted Markopolos to copy Madoff’s strategy. Markopolos tried. But he couldn’t figure out what Madoff’s strategy was. Madoff claimed to be making his money based on heavy trading of a financial instrument known as a derivative. But there was simply no trace of Madoff in those markets. “I was trading huge amounts of derivatives every year, and so I had relationships with the largest investment banks that traded derivatives,” Markopolos remembers. So I called the people that I knew on the trading desks: “Are you trading with Madoff?” They all said no. Well, if you are trading derivatives, you pretty much have to go to the largest five banks to trade the size that he was trading. If the largest five banks don’t know your trades and are not seeing your business, then you have to be a Ponzi scheme. It’s that easy. It was not a hard case. All I had to do was pick up the phone, really.

Harvard University biologist David Haig has spent the last few years systematically debunking the notion that the relationship between a mother and her unborn child is anything like the rose-tinted idyll that one usually finds on the glossy covers of maternity magazines. In fact, it is anything but. Pre-eclampsia, a condition of dangerously high blood pressure in pregnant women, is brutally kick-started by nothing short of a foetal coup d’état. It begins with the placenta invading the maternal bloodstream and initiating what, in anyone’s book, is a ruthless biological heist – an in utero sting operation to draw out vital nutrients. And I’m not just talking about baby Gordon Gekkos here – I’m talking about all of us. The curtain-raiser is well known to obstetricians. The foetus begins by injecting a crucial protein into the mother’s circulation which forces her to drive more blood, and therefore more nourishment, into the relatively low-pressure placenta. It’s a scam, pure and simple, which poses a significant and immediate risk to the mother’s life. ‘The bastard!’ says Andy. ‘Shall we get some olives?’ ‘And it’s by no means the only one,’ I continue. In another embryonic Ponzi scheme, foetal release of placental lactogen counteracts the effect of maternal insulin thereby increasing the mother’s blood sugar level and providing an excess for the foetus’s own benefit. ‘A bowl of the citrus and chilli and a bowl of the sweet pepper and basil,’ Andy says to the waiter. Then he peers at me over the menu. ‘So basically what you’re saying then is this: forget the Gaddafis and the Husseins. When it comes to chemical warfare it’s the unborn child that’s top dog!’ ‘Well they definitely nick stuff that isn’t theirs,’ I say. ‘And they don’t give a damn about the consequences.’ Andy smiles. ‘So in other words they’re psychopaths!’ he says. BABY

Everywhere you look with this young lady, there’s a purity of motivation,” Shultz told him. “I mean she really is trying to make the world better, and this is her way of doing it.” Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated,” the retired general gushed. Parloff didn’t end up using those quotes in his article, but the ringing endorsements he heard in interview after interview from the luminaries on Theranos’s board gave him confidence that Elizabeth was the real deal. He also liked to think of himself as a pretty good judge of character. After all, he’d dealt with his share of dishonest people over the years, having worked in a prison during law school and later writing at length about such fraudsters as the carpet-cleaning entrepreneur Barry Minkow and the lawyer Marc Dreier, both of whom went to prison for masterminding Ponzi schemes. Sure, Elizabeth had a secretive streak when it came to discussing certain specifics about her company, but he found her for the most part to be genuine and sincere. Since his angle was no longer the patent case, he didn’t bother to reach out to the Fuiszes. — WHEN PARLOFF’S COVER STORY was published in the June 12, 2014, issue of Fortune, it vaulted Elizabeth to instant stardom. Her Journal interview had gotten some notice and there had also been a piece in Wired, but there was nothing like a magazine cover to grab people’s attention. Especially when that cover featured an attractive young woman wearing a black turtleneck, dark mascara around her piercing blue eyes, and bright red lipstick next to the catchy headline “THIS CEO IS OUT FOR BLOOD.” The story disclosed Theranos’s valuation for the first time as well as the fact that Elizabeth owned more than half of the company. There was also the now-familiar comparison to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. This time it came not from George Shultz but from her old Stanford professor Channing Robertson. (Had Parloff read Robertson’s testimony in the Fuisz trial, he would have learned that Theranos was paying him $500,000 a year, ostensibly as a consultant.) Parloff also included a passage about Elizabeth’s phobia of needles—a detail that would be repeated over and over in the ensuing flurry of coverage his story unleashed and become central to her myth. When the editors at Forbes saw the Fortune article, they immediately assigned reporters to confirm the company’s valuation and the size of Elizabeth’s ownership stake and ran a story about her in their next issue. Under the headline “Bloody Amazing,” the article pronounced her “the youngest woman to become a self-made billionaire.” Two months later, she graced one of the covers of the magazine’s annual Forbes 400 issue on the richest people in America. More fawning stories followed in USA Today, Inc., Fast Company, and Glamour, along with segments on NPR, Fox Business, CNBC, CNN, and CBS News. With the explosion of media coverage came invitations to numerous conferences and a cascade of accolades. Elizabeth became the youngest person to win the Horatio Alger Award. Time magazine named her one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. President Obama appointed her a U.S. ambassador for global entrepreneurship, and Harvard Medical School invited her to join its prestigious board of fellows.

Most lawyers couldn’t recognize a Ponzi scheme if they were having dinner with Charles Ponzi.

the way bubbles work is structurally identical to Ponzi schemes—what a coincidence!—and indeed it’s another amazing coincidence how much the entire capitalist economy resembles in its basic structure either a Ponzi scheme or a bundle of Ponzi schemes.

Economics is a notoriously complicated subject. To make things easier, let’s imagine a simple example. Samuel Greedy, a shrewd financier, founds a bank in El Dorado, California. A. A. Stone, an up-and-coming contractor in El Dorado, finishes his first big job, receiving payment in cash to the tune of $1 million. He deposits this sum in Mr Greedy’s bank. The bank now has $1 million in capital. In the meantime, Jane McDoughnut, an experienced but impecunious El Dorado chef, thinks she sees a business opportunity – there’s no really good bakery in her part of town. But she doesn’t have enough money of her own to buy a proper facility complete with industrial ovens, sinks, knives and pots. She goes to the bank, presents her business plan to Greedy, and persuades him that it’s a worthwhile investment. He issues her a $1 million loan, by crediting her account in the bank with that sum. McDoughnut now hires Stone, the contractor, to build and furnish her bakery. His price is $1,000,000. When she pays him, with a cheque drawn on her account, Stone deposits it in his account in the Greedy bank. So how much money does Stone have in his bank account? Right, $2 million. How much money, cash, is actually located in the bank’s safe? Yes, $1 million. It doesn’t stop there. As contractors are wont to do, two months into the job Stone informs McDoughnut that, due to unforeseen problems and expenses, the bill for constructing the bakery will actually be $2 million. Mrs McDoughnut is not pleased, but she can hardly stop the job in the middle. So she pays another visit to the bank, convinces Mr Greedy to give her an additional loan, and he puts another $1 million in her account. She transfers the money to the contractor’s account. How much money does Stone have in his account now? He’s got $3 million. But how much money is actually sitting in the bank? Still just $1 million. In fact, the same $1 million that’s been in the bank all along. Current US banking law permits the bank to repeat this exercise seven more times. The contractor would eventually have $10 million in his account, even though the bank still has but $1 million in its vaults. Banks are allowed to loan $10 for every dollar they actually possess, which means that 90 per cent of all the money in our bank accounts is not covered by actual coins and notes.2 If all of the account holders at Barclays Bank suddenly demand their money, Barclays will promptly collapse (unless the government steps in to save it). The same is true of Lloyds, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and all other banks in the world. It sounds like a giant Ponzi scheme, doesn’t it? But if it’s a fraud, then the entire modern economy is a fraud. The fact is, it’s not a deception, but rather a tribute to the amazing abilities of the human imagination. What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our trust in the future. This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world.

A high school dropout, Robert Vesco bilked and conned his way to riches. Two times Forbes magazine named Vesco as one of the 400 richest Americans. The articles simply stated that he was a thief. As a man continually on the run, he was constantly attempting to buy his way out of the many complicated predicaments he got himself into. In 1970, Vesco made a successful bid to take over Investors Overseas Services (IOS), an offshore, Geneva-based mutual fund investment firm, worth $1.5 Billion. Employing 25,000 people and selling mutual funds throughout Europe, primarily in Germany, he thought of the company as his own private slush fund. Using the investors’ money as his own, he escalated his investment firm into a grand “Ponzi Scheme.” During this time he also made an undisclosed $200,000 contribution to Maurice Stans, Finance Chairman for President Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President, known as CREEP. To make matters worse, the media discovered that his contribution was being used to help finance the infamous Watergate burglary.

The most intensely value-laden artifacts of human creativity - works of art - are now the purist examples of that old capitalist alchemy: turning human value into exchange value. At a certain point, and that point has been passed, the art market will only be a mathematical exchange. Art is worth money, but what’s money worth? Money is the ultimate numbers game. What the furor over the art market brings tantalizingly close to the surface is the fact that it is not just the value of art that is dependant on a shared fantasy, it is also money itself. Warhol is not the name of an artist, it is the name of a currency. “Warhol” is a big number because its denomination (soup cans, Brillo box simulacrums, etc.) is presumed to be stable and growing. But it can inflate or deflate like any stock or bond or national currency. Jeff Koons is also a currency but less stable. The only thing that really changes hands are the numbers that are for some reason associated with these opaque talismans called “artworks.” The billionaire buyers of these works have been reduced to South sea natives who insist on the magical properties of certain queer objects - a cornhusk doll with pearls for eyes and a colourful ribbon about its head - but are unable to say why they are so important or why their world would collapse without them. Investors in the art market need to fear bot only the economic boogies of bubbles and ponzi schemes but also that dreaded moment when they look at one another in panic and say, “What were we thinking? What is this stuff? What could have possessed us to say that a glass balloon dog is worth thens of millions? Sell! Sell!

If it's all so innocent what's the problem? We live in a crumbling multiethnic Ponzi-scheme society requiring a highly policed cultural environment to avoid outright chaos. That's the problem.

Social Security recipients, who have been forced to pay into this alleged retirement system, will have their benefits slashed, and those who are currently paying into the system will be forced to face the fact that they have been participating in a Ponzi scheme.

Of all the unlikely people to get mixed up with Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, Stephen Greenspan is the type of person you’d expect to be immune to investment fraud. With advanced degrees from Johns Hopkins University, he spent his career as a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado studying social incompetence and gullibility. At the time of his retirement, Greenspan had published nearly 100 scientific papers and was well-known in psychology for his book Annals of Gullibility. With interest and expertise in the science of gullibility, shouldn’t Greenspan have recognized that Madoff’s firm was a scam? Yet he too was one of BLMIS’s private investors.

Two barred owls traded their call-and-response: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all? Who would ever cook for this boy, aside from me? I couldn’t imagine Robin toughening up enough to survive this Ponzi scheme of a planet. Maybe I didn’t want him to. I liked him otherworldly.

We would never consider for a moment paying the team members equally. In the Olympics we usually have some of the world’s fastest runners yet have lost some of the relay races because we could not pass the baton without dropping it! We take it for granted that accountability must be individual; there must be someone to praise for victory and someone to blame for defeat, the individual where “the buck stops.” In fact, instead of admiring relationships, we value and admire individual competitiveness, winning out over each other, outdoing each other conversationally, pulling the clever con game, and selling stuff that the customer does not need. We believe in caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), and we justify exploitation with “There’s a sucker born every minute.” We breed mistrust of strangers, but we don’t have any formulas for how to test or build trust. We value our freedom without realizing that this breeds caution and mistrust of each other. When we are taken in by a Ponzi scheme and lose all our money, we don’t blame our culture or our own greed—we blame the regulators who should have caught it and kick ourselves for not getting in on it earlier.

A variation of Get Rich Quick schemes was robbing Peter to pay Paul, or benefiting one person at the expense of others. The origin of the phrase is open to dispute, but one account traces it to the 1500s in England, when the lands of Saint Peter’s Church at Westminster were sold to fund repairs at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London.

I kept up the bluff, hoping that I might eventually hit upon some workable plan to pay all of my creditors in full.

Each exposure of previously secret misdeeds—steroid use, Ponzi schemes, rigged intelligence—produces an acute and debilitating psychological effect.

Because revelations of systemic deception erode our most basic, default expectation of good faith, they play an outsize role in producing a crisis of authority. Each exposure of previously secret misdeeds—steroid use, Ponzi schemes, rigged intelligence—produces an acute and debilitating psychological effect. Vertigo sets in, similar to that experienced by a spouse who, after decades of what he thought was a happy, loyal marriage, discovers his wife has been cheating all along. Suddenly we realize we live in a world entirely more depraved than the one we thought we inhabited.

Securities Exchange Company

To himself, Ponzi rationalized the difference between his Securities Exchange Company and copycat upstarts: “Perhaps my activities were not entirely within the law,” he allowed. “But my intent was honest. I was in a critical position and I had fallen into it without any intention to do wrong. Now that I was in it, I was trying my hardest to pull myself out of it, without hurting my investors.

In the remarkable seven months since it had opened for business, the Securities Exchange Company had amassed thirty thousand investors and $9.6 million. All Ponzi had to do to keep them satisfied was to pay them nearly $15 million in return.

The welfare state may be well intended but it is a Ponzi scheme. People are paying in to support the people who previously paid in, but there isn't enough coming in, so it will collapse, like eery Ponzi scheme does. By the way, I had the author of a biography on Ponzi on my show. Ponzi was a good guy. He just got messed up and so he had to keep collecting money to pay the other people who paid in earlier. He didn't mean bad. Ponzi turns out to be somewhat of a Saint. He heard of a girl who was in a fire, and he gave his own skin for her skin grafts. A total stranger. Ponzi is the quintessential Liberal. Means well, and creates something destructive.

Spoofing? No. Ponzi scheme? Not at all! Just finance. Legal as hell.

Progressives run for office as the champions of Social Security. Progressives viciously attack any politician who exposes the financial irresponsibility or speaks out against the Ponzi scheme as being “against Social Security” and “against seniors.

balding man in his late 50s. He had a large round gut and pudgy little fingers. Luke knew his story. He was a desk jockey, a man who had come up through the government bureaucracy. On September 11, he was at Treasury running a team analyzing tax evasion and Ponzi schemes. He slid over to counter-terrorism when Homeland Security was created. He had

I talk about writing and write so much because aside from music, it’s the only thing giving me peace and reason and purpose. Everyone is looking for answers but I don’t have them and I’m not the answer, but I feel like if I could see the face of God, I’d be better, healed—absolved. I feel like a bastard and like I’m pushing a Ponzi scheme every time someone comes to me for guidance and I push them to the “right” path when I’m just as lost as they are. And it makes me feel like shit every time someone wants to look up to me, or when people call me strong or brave or amazing or want to tell me how “great” I am. And then, the next moment, I’m fine, until the next tide of emotion comes again. I’m just a person who’s had a lot of time to think—a flawed and fucked-up person.

If this sounds like a Ponzi scheme it is because it is the mother of all Ponzi schemes. A merry-go-round of Ponzi austerity which, interestingly, left both the insolvent banks and the insolvent Greek state a little more insolvent while, all along, the Greek population was sinking deeper and deeper into despair. And all so the European Union could pretend that its inane rules had been respected.

when growth, potency, happiness, pressure to be in a good mood, to “have a nice day,” to be “high” are hopelessly intertwined with consumer goodies, not having them means a drop into shame, depression, and victimization. In the real world of limited resources, growth is a Ponzi scheme in which our great-grandchildren subsidize our innocent and narcissistic fantasies.

Like a giant Ponzi scheme, profits depended on an unending source of associates entering at the bottom of the pyramid, funneling cash up the chain,

Like a giant Ponzi scheme, profits depended on an unending source of associates entering at the bottom of the pyramid, funneling cash up the chain, and departing before making partner.

bubbles and Ponzi schemes and capitalism all have to keep growing or else they are in deep shit.

Criminals are the handful of Americans who have made a conscious decision that preying on other people will be their profession, their way of life. No, they don’t want a job. They don’t want to start a legitimate business. They have decided to abuse other people to get rich. I’m talking about everybody from serious drug traffickers and professional robbers to people like Bernie Madoff, who stole billions from hardworking Americans in a Ponzi scheme, to the people who ripped off billions in taxpayer money from Paycheck Protection Plan loans during the pandemic.

Historical Ponzi schemes require a central authority to hide the facts and promise a certain annual percent return. Bitcoin has neither. The system is decentralized, and the facts are out in the open. People can sell any time, and they do, and no one is guaranteed any return.

The Ponzi scheme is a specific and easily identifiably structure that isn’t applicable to Bitcoin but could be to some phony cryptoassets. While a truly innovative cryptoasset and its associated architecture requires a heroic coding effort from talented developers, because the software is open source, it can be downloaded and duplicated. From there, a new cryptoasset can be issued wrapped in slick marketing.

Haseltine was angry and flustered by the charge and had to ask Dr. Robert Redfield, an AIDS researcher from the military, how the slide was prepared. At the forum Redfield said, “different measurements were used,” but later that night at a post-forum party, according to Lauritsen’s report, Redfield told Duesberg and other people at the gathering that “the graph

Science had been supplanted by totalitarian petulance.

He laid out the draconian media policy that he would maintain for the nearly thirty years he ran the totalitarian HIV/AIDS empire in a brief piece he wrote for the AAAS Observer on September 1, 1989.

When new retroviruses were found in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients by scientists Elaine DeFreitas and Judy Mikovits, the work was not discredited just because the retroviruses would show that CFS is real. The truth is that it was undermined because the work

But that is all in the future. These days, the local newspaper publishes an endless stream of stories about drug arrests, shootings, drunk-driving crashes, the stupidity of local politicians, and the lamentable surplus of “affordable housing.” Like similar places, the town is up to its eyeballs in wrathful bitterness against public workers. As in, Why do they deserve a decent life when the rest of us have no chance at all? It’s every man for himself here in a “competition for crumbs,” as a Fall River friend puts it. For all that, it is an exemplary place in one respect: as a vantage point from which to contemplate the diminishing opportunities of modern American life. This is the project of Fall River Herald News columnist Marc Munroe Dion, one of the last remaining practitioners of the working-class style that used to be such a staple of journalism in this country. Here in Fall River, the sarcastic, hard-boiled sensibility makes a last stand against the indifference of the affluent world. Dion pours his acid derision on the bike paths that Fall River has (of course) built for the yet-to-arrive creative class. He cheers for the bravery of Wal-Mart workers who, it appears, are finally starting to stand up to their bosses. He watches a 2012 Obama-Romney debate and thinks of all the people he knows who would be considered part of Romney’s lazy 47 percent—including his own mother, a factory worker during World War II who was now “draining our country dry through the twin Ponzi schemes of Social Security and Medicare.”16 “To us, it looks as though the city is dissolving,” Dion wrote in late 2015. As the working-class apocalypse takes hold, he invites readers to remember exactly what it was they once liked about their town. “Fall River used to be a good place to be poor,” he concludes. “You didn’t need much education to work, you didn’t need much money to live and you knew everybody.” As that life has disappeared, so have the politics that actually made some kind of sense; they were an early casualty of what has happened here. Those who still care about the war of Rs and Ds, Dion writes, are practicing “political rituals that haven’t made sense since the 1980s, feathered tribesmen dancing around a god carved out of a tree trunk.”17

If Bitcoin was a ponzi scheme destined for failure, the government wouldn’t spend so much time, resources, and the almighty FIAT currency in discrediting a tech that is destined to succeed.

Indeed, what was remarkable about this scheme wasn’t Ponzi. It was his victims. If people really would believe that a 34-year-old ex-bank clerk who had just served three years in prison for check kiting was capable of doubling their money in six months by exchanging millions of 10 cent postal coupons from Europe – well, if they would believe that, then they would believe anything.

At least that was Ivar’s reputation. The truth was more complicated. A large portion of the dividends recently paid by Swedish Match and Kreuger & Toll came from cash raised by International Match in America. In other words, the dividends paid to old investors came from proceeds raised from new ones. That pyramid approach, which had elements of Ponzi’s scheme, couldn’t last forever, and Ivar knew it. Nevertheless, Ivar really was making money, a lot of it, from match operations throughout the world. Unlike Charles Ponzi’s postal reply coupon scam, Ivar’s profits were real. Swedish Match made and sold billions of boxes of matches every year. Kreuger & Toll built landmark buildings throughout Europe. Ivar had real investments in real businesses, ranging from matches to real estate to film. No one could fake that.

When railway companies faltered in the late 1840s, struggling to return 10 per cent on investments, many began to fiddle their books. For example, they treated costs as capital investments rather than as expenses, thereby inflating their profits; and used fresh investments instead of profits to pay out dividends (a strategy now known as a Ponzi scheme, made infamous most recently by Bernie Madoff in 2009).

At the heart lay a culture of regulatory capture, bureaucratic silos, plain incompetence, and outsized greed, resulting in the abandonment of each institution’s fiduciary responsibilities.

Largely incomprehensible: Madoff’s staff of high school–educated clerks facilitated the Ponzi scheme for 40 years without a single one ever realizing it was a Ponzi scheme.

In a remarkable 477-page document, “Investigation of Failure of the SEC to Uncover Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme—Public Version,” August 31, 2009, Report No. OIG-509, the SEC investigates and documents its own repeated failures, beginning in 1992 and continuing until Madoff confessed in 2008,

The goal is for all the families to become a cog in a wheel of a gigantic Ponzi scheme that somehow will result in new Smart Boards (again) for the entire school.

The commercials—buy gold, get a second mortgage, consolidate your debt, invest in crypto—all seemed like legal versions of Ponzi schemes to her. The American economy relies more on the con than we like to think.

Het enige Ponzi-systeem dat ik ken is de pensioenkas.

The way we pay for the present by liquidating the future truly fits the definition of a Ponzi scheme. Any other forms of Ponzi schemes are outlawed, only the ecological one we seem to ignore or even encourage.

Race and class divisions, power imbalances, anti-intellectualism, anti-democratic leanings, and widespread poverty—not to mention Ponzi schemes—once we saw them as glitches in a country built on high ideals. The Great Man showed us otherwise. The flaws we had called incidental were underpinnings. They comprised a grand tradition, present always.

The problem is, the money investors take out of the system is coming from other investors who are putting money into the system, and the stock market is just a system that shuffles cash between investors. It is a system where current investors’ profits are strictly dependent on the inflow of money from new investors. And, such a system is also known as a “Ponzi scheme.

The global financial crisis was caused by excesses of the liberal system of regulations and the belief that a completely free market will allow enormous innovation and allocate capital to the most profitable enterprises with the highest returns. Once the Federal Reserve Chairman decided it was not necessary to regulate derivatives and supervise them, the fuse was lit. Once you find that you can mash up a lot of good and bad assets in one bundle and pass on your risk all around Europe and other parts of the world, you have started something like a Ponzi scheme which must come to an end sometime…The business of a person in a financial institution is to make the biggest profit for himself, so just condemning the bankers and the profit takers does not make sense. You have allowed these rules, and they work within these rules.

Many North American cities are just waking up to the fact that they have been engaging in a massive urban Ponzi scheme, with new development creating short-term benefits in development fees and tax revenues but even bigger long-term costs that pile up faster than cities’ ability to pay them off.

Fashion is a Ponzi scheme for social capital.

They had encountered fraud cases, even Ponzi schemes, before. But they had never faced anything on this scale. The tally of customer losses was staggering, and the victims were spread around the globe.

the claim that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme is itself part of the basis for calls to dismantle it and replace it with something that’s easier for the financial-services industry to charge fees on.

willingness of the scientists to abandon the traditional rules of evidence known as Koch’s postulates. Instead, AIDS researchers, including the ones at the amfAR forum, were willing to “revise Koch’s in a more permissive direction: it would no longer be necessary to find the microbe in all cases of the disease. Mere correlations between microbial antibodies and the progression of the disease would be sufficient. HIV could be proved ‘epidemiologically’ to be the cause of AIDS.” (PBP p.145)

this sounds like a Ponzi scheme it is because it is the mother of all Ponzi schemes. A merry go around of Ponzi Austerity which, interestingly, left both the insolvent banks and the insolvent Greek state a little more… insolvent

The hitch, Ponzi understood, would be getting cash for the stamps he bought with the coupons. One possibility would be to sell the stamps at a slight discount to businesses that used large amounts of postage, giving them a bargain on a necessary item while still maintaining huge profits for Ponzi. Another hurdle would be figuring out how to buy and transport the enormous numbers of coupons necessary to turn a significant profit. But those crucial details would wait for another day.

couldn’t imagine Robin toughening up enough to survive this Ponzi scheme of a planet.

But the pull of newspapering was strong. Eighteen months later, Grozier moved to New York and became personal secretary to Joseph Pulitzer, the Hungarian-born editor of the New York World and a journalism legend in the making. Pulitzer pioneered a formula of compelling human-interest stories, social justice crusades, and sensational battles with William Randolph Hearst and the New York Journal. Under Pulitzer, the World became the most profitable and most copied newspaper in the nation. Edwin Grozier had a front-row seat, and he was in thrall to Pulitzer: “I never saw anyone to equal him. His mind was like a flash of lightning, illuminating the dark places.

Ponzi schemes exist in stable disequilibrium.

When trust is depressed, cynicism rises. Right now, it looks like an early frontrunner for mood of the 2020s. And why shouldn’t it be? Our culture is flush with predators, Ponzi schemes, and propaganda. It’s reasonable to decide people are interested only in themselves.

For example, consider how Paul Graham explained Yahoo’s valuation in 1999: By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo’s revenue growth. So they invested in new internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of “Eureka!” I was shouting “Sell!” 146

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