Ponzi scheme

Madoff Talks: Uncovering the Untold Story Behind the Most Notorious Ponzi Scheme in History

by Jim Campbell  · 26 Apr 2021  · 369pp  · 107,073 words

invaluable source, including providing the author with exclusive access to Madoff’s private contacts and diaries of activities in the final frantic months of the Ponzi scheme. A forensic consultant, Bruce Dubinsky, and his team unraveled in intricate detail exactly how Madoff operated the end-to-end fake investment process that

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enabled the Ponzi scheme. Dubinsky uncovered the staggering and still relatively unknown amount of money Madoff stole from his investment advisory (IA) clients to launder into his leading market

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. He had an oblivious, to various degrees, small staff of largely high school graduates he manipulated without them ever figuring out they were facilitating a Ponzi scheme. Also mostly unknown, Madoff had four large coconspirators, the “Big Four,” as he referred to them, who were complicit. Bernie’s partners in crime

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the nineteenth floor, where the market-making business was an industry innovator, while simultaneously using obsolete technology on the seventeenth floor to purposely obscure the Ponzi scheme business. And we will unpack Madoff’s “black box” strategy that delivered the implausible investment returns. HOW DID MADOFF GET AWAY WITH IT FOR

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keep it solvent. Absent the injection of Ponzi money, BLMIS would have been insolvent as early as 2001, seven years before the demise of the Ponzi scheme. The forensic investigation uncovered the exhaustive system behind Madoff’s fraud: the fake, backdated trading, the allocation of fake trades to clients’ accounts, the

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some cases, investors wiped out by Madoff were then targeted by the Madoff Recovery Trustee, Irving Picard, charged with “clawing back” money lost in the Ponzi scheme. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, clawing back over 70 percent of the original investment losses (though not based on the victims’ final statements). The

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Madoff had been arrested. The SEC, which had conducted no fewer than five investigations of Madoff and BLMIS but somehow never managed to uncover the Ponzi scheme, sent a group in from its New York Regional office. James Capezzuto, acting associate regional director at the SEC, responsible for the examination program

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the regulators, Frank was the master operator behind the mastermind. Madoff could not have pulled it off without DiPascali. He scaled up an industrial-strength Ponzi scheme operation, implementing each component of the diabolical scheme emanating from Madoff’s brilliant mind. It was after business hours on the evening of December 3

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Madoff, managed by Frank DiPascali, and operated by unwitting seventeenth-floor overpaid clerks. Some knew more than others. None knew it was a Ponzi scheme, other than Bernie. MADOFF PONZI SCHEME OPERATIONAL CORNERSTONE #1: THE SPLIT STRIKE CONVERSION INVESTMENT STRATEGY The brilliance of Madoff’s split strike conversion* strategy evolved from its seeming opaque

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complexity; while operationally, it allowed Madoff to scale up the Ponzi scheme to match the exponential account growth. Just as Madoff automated the legitimate market-making business, he automated the fraud-making business. On the surface, the

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disloyalty. Madoff explained how DiPascali, despite his critical role perpetuating the fraud, somehow managed not to figure out it was a Ponzi scheme: “We never talked about it being a Ponzi scheme. I always claimed the trades were being executed in Europe with an electronic linkage software package. He certainly knew creating records that

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and her partner had only recently adopted two boys out of poverty from Guatemala. It would be a traumatic separation for the family. PONZI SCHEME OPERATIONAL CORNERSTONE #3: AUTOMATING THE PONZI SCHEME Madoff ran a $65 billion fraud with antiquated technology and lower-caliber systems talent. Just two programmers automated the huge fraud. Jerome

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the promised performance benchmarks by year end. It sometimes required outlandish returns for December if accounts were significantly below target. In more damning evidence the Ponzi scheme started from the beginning, the Shtup file originated with A&B as far back as in the 1970s. According to Paul Roberts, the FBI financial

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(Figure 4.2). Figure 4.2 George Perez’s note to himself, documenting his fear Source: Trial Transcripts—George Perez Note—Vol. 14. P. A1267 PONZI SCHEME OPERATIONAL CORNERSTONE #4: EVADING THE REGULATORS DiPascali spent a significant part of his time preparing for regulatory examinations, particularly, SEC investigations in 2004, 2005, and

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these billions in customer assets. When it came to evading the regulators, Madoff had decades of regulatory credibility built up and all the angles covered. PONZI SCHEME OPERATIONAL CORNERSTONE #5: CRITICAL CASH INFUSIONS BY THE BIG FOUR AND FEEDERS In 2005–2006 Madoff faced not only an SEC examination but an existential

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exact identities of the other side of the custom negotiated options contracts. The international auditors never followed up either. 3.Where’s the money? Basic Ponzi scheme detection involves validating the assets exist. Access to Madoff’s 703 JPMC bank statements would have revealed there were no documented payments to and from

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some of which he’d given contradictory responses to. He frequently slow-balled documentation requests, often never bothering to deliver them. Failure to Detect the Ponzi Scheme #1: Madoff’s Brilliant Exploitation of the Organizational Silos and Incompetence of the SEC A critical reason the SEC was not able to uncover the

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trading business to prop it up. The forensic team found BLMIS was permeated with fraud and effectively insolvent beginning in 2001, seven years before the Ponzi scheme collapsed. ON THE MONEY TRAIL WITH THE FORENSIC INVESTIGATORS The forensic investigators were able to trace every dollar that flowed through the 703 account. There

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Major League Baseball could have stripped them of their franchise. Believe it or not, at least one of the investors with Wilpon even took out Ponzi scheme insurance. In February 2001, Chuck Klein, who was a business partner and friend, purchased fraud insurance for his investment vehicle, American Securities, to protect

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in market value from the vagaries of the market. What investor wouldn’t understand that to be obvious? The fundamental SIPC failure in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme lies in the agency’s inexcusably inadequate reserve funds to cover customers’ recoupment of losses resulting from fraud they innocently knew nothing about. On December

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BLMIS liquidation process. Picard’s mission was to make Madoff victims as whole as possible. A challenge, since normally little to nothing is recovered from Ponzi schemes. Picard ended up, in essence, covering for the inadequacy of the SIPC reserves by effectively, albeit ruthlessly on occasion, pursuing, counterintuitively in terms of

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losses has been an astonishing 74 percent as of November 2020, most likely the best recovery rate of assets ever for a Ponzi scheme. The second largest Ponzi scheme after Madoff, the Stanford Ponzi scheme, resulted in $8 billion of losses for its investors, and the SIPC Trustee on that case recovered a mere $500 million

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regulatory system. The central conclusions of an independent GAO report to Congress on SIPC, a full 16 years prior to the unraveling of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, had warned of the inadequacy of the customer reserves and highlighted the critical dependency on competent and rigorous regulatory oversight, which also proved woefully inadequate

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of changing the rules when it came to reimbursing failed firms’ customer losses, shifting definitions of what it would cover, even taking different positions within Ponzi schemes. Even if the investor had never touched the original investment over the years, only taken out interest and dividends, if it amounted to more

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12 Not only has SIPC appeared to move the goalposts, but they’ve also shifted obligations within the same SIPA liquidation of Ponzi schemes. In “New Times Securities Services, Inc.,” the Ponzi scheme conned customers into investing in money market funds, two that were real—Vanguard and Putnam, and one that was nonexistent—“New

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only consistency on SIPC recoveries seemed to be whatever minimized SIPC’s exposure. This despite testimony before Congress by SIPC president Stephen Harbeck about another Ponzi scheme, in which customers were made whole based on their final statement: “Customers will be paid even if their funds are not there; even if

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foundations—including philanthropic and startup investments in Israel and Russia—had collectively withdrawn over a billion dollars of other people’s money from the BLMIS Ponzi scheme. While his settlement with Picard of $277 million seemed a good deal versus withdrawing over a billion dollars, Picard did not mess around with

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to much of the public perception, there is no direct evidence implicating Ruth, Mark, or Andrew Madoff as complicit or having any knowledge of the Ponzi scheme. My assessment is based on personal interaction with Bernie, Ruth, and Andrew, and ultimately more importantly, a complete independent investigation into every claim or

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I got to know Ruth Madoff. Everything I uncovered from our relationship convinced me that she didn’t know it was a Ponzi scheme either, or even understood what a Ponzi scheme was. She was, however, somewhat more inscrutable than Andy. First, she was in the cult of Bernie, at least initially after

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Andrew and Catherine (Figure 8.1), which lacked the word “love” in his sign off, he was sending me long, multipage, handwritten letters rationalizing the Ponzi scheme. With his overwhelming narcissism, he obviously couldn’t fully empathize with Andrew and Catherine. Neither could he help himself in always brining it back trying

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certain consequences once I realized recovery was impossible.”36 Bernie may have been brilliant, but ultimately his thinking was illogical. He should have known that Ponzi schemes never last. THE DOUBLE LIFE Bernie lived a double life. The industry titan and champion of a business built on integrity created the most notorious

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Jewish investors and charities. He built a legitimate business he could have sold for billions, meaning he had no need to create a Ponzi scheme. Yet he did. The Ponzi scheme precluded him from ever attaining those billions. Armchair analysis of Bernie as nothing more than a sociopath and financial serial killer seemed too

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revealed he was likable, brilliant, with total recall. He sounded credible. He was candid about his crimes, but anything not directly linked to the Ponzi scheme admission he unfailingly dismissed with what turned about to be lies, no matter how obvious, insignificant, or unnecessary they were. He could never be wrong

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obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are unwanted, intrusive thoughts, images, or urges that trigger intensely distressing feelings. Source: International OCD Foundation. 10 NEVER AGAIN No More Ponzi Schemes (and the Big Conspiracies the Government Missed) Bernie Madoff: “Jim, this certainly sounds strange coming from me now, but people can confirm that I was

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issues but will not alter the market risk or due diligence issues.”11 If only Bernie had stopped Bernie. SYSTEMIC REGULATORY REFORM For a Madoff Ponzi scheme to never happen again requires systemic reform. The government agencies designed to protect investors failed. The SEC conducted five failed investigations that appeared instead to

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the original investment, which may have been made decades prior. SIPC should have charged Wall Street member firms a special assessment to cover the Madoff Ponzi scheme losses, because of failed regulatory investigations and inadequate customer protections. This would disincentivize Wall Street firms from keeping quiet when they had suspicions of fraud

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s covered or not covered. At the time Madoff collapsed, the 60-page statute did not contain a single word on Ponzi schemes. SIPC essentially absolved itself of responsibility to cover Ponzi schemes, though no such caveats were spelled out for investors. The industry undermined its own credibility by not honoring the value of

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that SIPC protection be based on final statement values. SIPC should delineate and maintain an unwavering commitment to exactly how they will protect investors from Ponzi schemes and various frauds. SIPC should use the constant dollar method (CDM). If any other method than final statement value is used, recoveries should include

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to the regulatory structure and on Wall Street. Now. The Two Big Conspiracies the Government Missed The biggest untold story of the Madoff Ponzi scheme may be that the Ponzi scheme itself may not have even been the biggest crime, or certainly the only major crime. Bernie Madoff himself may have been a dupe

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theory of prosecution against any of Mr. Madoff’s larger customers.”21 International Money Laundering International money laundering remained an untold subplot in the Madoff Ponzi scheme. To tackle it might have been dangerous. According to an anonymous source in the hedge funds community: “Someone had tried to reach out to

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which otherwise would have been insolvent a full seven years before Madoff confessed in 2008. Little realized: Madoff ran an astonishing $170 billion through his Ponzi scheme bank account at JPMorgan Chase, equivalent to the GDP of a small country. Largely incomprehensible: Madoff’s staff of high school–educated clerks facilitated the

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it, fair and square, building a completely legitimate business worth as much as $3 billion at one point. There was never a need for a Ponzi scheme, though he fit the fraudster profile characterized by narcissistic hubris, excessive secrecy, obsessive control, pathological lies, and always looking to cut corners. Madoff was

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/Article/whatwedo.html. 4. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Office of Investigations: Investigation into the Failure of the SEC to Uncover Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme—Public Version,” https://www.sec.gov/files/oig-509.pdf. 5. SEC IG Report on Madoff Investigation. 6. Interview with Harry Markopolos, March 14,

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, 55 Picower Institute for Medical Research, 55 Piedrahita, Andrés, 156 Pink sheets, 32 P&Ls (see Profit and loss reports) Pomerantz, Steven, 163–166, 256 Ponzi schemes, xvii, xxiv, 184 Pottruck, David, 21 Price Waterhouse (PW), 66, 110, 193, 277 Prime brokerages, 122 Pritzker family, 273 Private placement memoranda (PPMs), 157

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Regional Office of, 133, 226 Northeast Regional Office of, 113–115 Office of Economic Analysis of, 109 organizational silos at, 154 oversight needed for, 286 Ponzi scheme victims and failure of, 214 and Rampart Investment Management, 118 real trading never verified by, 103–104, 106–109 reforming the, 278–282 and Robinhood

Madoff: The Final Word

by Richard Behar  · 9 Jul 2024

than fifteen years on the case, I am finally able to illuminate some of the most elusive questions in the whole saga: When did his Ponzi scheme begin? How, precisely, did it work? And, to paraphrase that oft-used line from the Watergate-scandal era, what did his family know, and

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could hardly pass up the chance to probe the unrivaled superstar of swindlers. Bernie was the architect of the world’s biggest and longest-running Ponzi scheme. And now he was opening the door to me. “Thank you for your kind card,” the 2011 email began, referring to a note of

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deception that served to protect an underlying fraud scheme of such mammoth proportions.” There are plenty of species of financial scams, but Bernie’s—the Ponzi scheme—is a classic. In its simplest form, a Ponzi involves taking money from one investor (as an investment) and passing it to another investor (

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with fake trades of stocks and more modest but consistent returns, for decades. Most Ponzis fall apart after a year or two. The longest known Ponzi scheme prior to Madoff’s arrest—launched in 1985 by a nobody named Dennis Helliwell, with an “exclusive fund” supposedly operated by a bank where

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the last eight years of BLMIS’s existence, if not earlier, Bernie was taking some $799 million in funds from his individual investors in the Ponzi scheme to help prop up the legitimate side of the business, which often lost money due to increased competition and technological advances on Wall Street. In

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, or “my problem,” as he often downplayed it, is so convoluted that some investigators are still trying to unravel it. (At its crux, a Ponzi scheme is one of the simpler frauds there is. But little about Madoff’s octopean universe was simple.) In parts of the book, I will be

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PRISON, IN BUTNER, NORTH CAROLINA, 2011 When the headlines started roaring in December 2008 that Bernard Lawrence Madoff was busted for running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme (upped later to $64.5 billion, and then to $68 billion), most Americans’ first reaction was, undoubtedly, “Who?” The global financial crisis, the worst

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his body in a chair, with one leg propped up on his desk. Before long, it became clear that Bernie had run nearly the entire Ponzi scheme out of a single checking account at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no. 140081703, nicknamed “the 703” by investigators after his arrest. Billions of dollars flowed

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minute, and I only receive a small salary here.” During our first meeting, Bernie spoke mainly about how and why (in his view) the Ponzi scheme began. He was especially fixated on how purported betrayals by key investors who’d been with him since the 1970s—the “Big Four,” he called

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+ % - Give David Figures…. Do setups.” Frank didn’t know it yet, but he was watching the trench-level labor required to maintain an ever-growing Ponzi scheme. * * * Imagine trying to keep track of a hundred thousand lies a month. Let’s say that you could use a computer, a printer, and

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alerting the authorities that something might not be quite right. But it’s tough to keep a perpetual money machine running. A Ponzi scheme that doesn’t expand is a doomed Ponzi scheme. For BLMIS to survive and grow, it needed massive, regular infusions of cash to fuel it. Madoff could have raised money

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What’s more, “for virtually the entire life” of the business, he sent investors false account statements and false trade confirmations. “It was essentially a Ponzi scheme,” he told them. Madoff also recounted the $30,000 loss his handful of clients (friends and family) suffered in 1962, which his father-in-law

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2010, I dined at the Red Rock Casino with Maurice “Moe” Rind, who went to prison for his role in one of the most legendary Ponzi schemes: ZZZZ Best, a 1980s Mafia-linked carpet-cleaning company. This Moe was an associate of Meyer Lansky, the most famous Jewish mobster in history.

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money to leverage himself when he was wrong regarding the market. “He would pull the stocks from their accounts.” In other words, he had a Ponzi scheme going. * * * Whether due to duplicity, greed, laziness, insecurity, or some combination of all of them, there is no evidence that Bernie actually bought or

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examiner that can’t possibly be true. It reads: “Genitals: Unremarkable.” The truth is that Picower had a remarkable set of balls. If Madoff’s Ponzi scheme itself had been an actual registered company, Picower—one of the biggest multibillionaires whom few people had ever heard of—would have owned a controlling

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technically a “debt” that Jeffry Picower owed Bernie. While the reason for that remains shrouded in mystery, investigators have long wondered if Picower controlled the Ponzi scheme. There is ample evidence that Picower knew certain frauds were being committed on his behalf, such as the backdating of trades. Over the years, the

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obvious financial smarts and decades-long investment with Bernie, “must” have known that there was a fraud going on, whether he knew it was a Ponzi scheme or something else. To show how much $7.2 billion is, consider that Goldman Sachs, where Picower kept the money, borrowed $10 billion from

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as the scheme skyrocketed. Given the symbiotic relationship between the two men, a natural question is whether Bernie himself served as a front for the Ponzi scheme, with Picower the true brains and even the owner of it. Or was Picower acting as Bernie’s bagman in some way? Investigators, having

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, the Horsemen didn’t honor the hold-harmless agreements, leading Madoff to make what he called the worst “mistake” of his life: hatching a Ponzi scheme that he believed would be temporary until he could bail himself out of the crisis that the Schleps had caused. “Quite frankly my story and

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Flumenbaum had revealed to him: Madoff’s sons claimed their father had made a “confession of sorts” that he had been running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. (In fact, when all the counting was done, it came to $68 billion.) “Fifty million,” said Johnson, sounding nonplussed. “No, I said billion,” responded

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action.” Vasilescu, who was at a Christmas party, said “Yeah,” but he, too, was nonplussed, having initially misread the email as “just a” $50 million Ponzi scheme. The magnitude of the true amount was not something anybody in the history of the office had dealt with before. But the account struck Johnson

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if there was an innocent explanation.” Standing there in his pj’s, Bernie confessed there was not. Yes, he’d been running a “$50 billion” Ponzi scheme. Fifty? Why not tell the feds it was actually more than $65 billion? Even before the cuffs went on, Bernie was tweaking his story to

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that it was Madoff, not Avellino and Bienes, who was making all the investment decisions. The agency suspected that A&B might be running a Ponzi scheme, but when Madoff returned all the funds to their investors, the case concluded. To this day, Frank Avellino has portrayed himself as a victim

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Nantucket, Massachusetts, like to adorn their dwellings with paintings and sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas, and Giacomo Manzù. All of it courtesy of the Ponzi scheme. As for Bienes and his wife, Dianne, they were widely known in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for their opulent, spectacular parties at their $7 million,

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would have been discovered. (But without a shortfall, it would be viewed as an illegal scheme that simply glommed on to Madoff, just as small Ponzi schemes have long attached themselves to major banks such as HSBC and Citibank, and, more recently, to firms such as Airbnb and Facebook.) What to

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redeemed. In order to provide the funds for this purpose, Bernie obtained cash and securities from other customers—that is, after all, what a Ponzi scheme is—and used the securities as collateral for loans. Most of the bailout money came from Jeffry Picower via large stock positions he held at

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estate seven months later. Fight over. Not only the trustee but also prosecutors had looked into whether proof existed that Mendelow knew it was a Ponzi scheme. But they closed the inquiry. “If you can’t indict Avellino, you can’t indict anyone [within the A&B orbit],” says former prosecutor

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pay you later.” Not surprisingly, he never did. Shortly after his arrest, Madoff wrote a rambling letter to Sonny Cohn, apologizing and blaming his Ponzi scheme on the fact that he’d once lost the money invested by family members (his 1960s tale) and couldn’t bear it, so he started

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have found that Madoff had no counterparties. In his 2004 email to his colleagues, Burnaby-Atkins eventually stated the unthinkable: “SUPPOSE this was the largest Ponzi scheme in history—unpalatable but we are not the first to suggest it…. No doubt many of these questions have been asked already but given his

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fifty-nine counts, but the sentences imposed by federal judge Laura Taylor Swain were significantly lighter than they could have been. It was the “biggest Ponzi scheme known to man,” proclaimed Judge Swain. So, when she announced the first prison sentence for the Five on December 8, 2014, FBI agent Paul

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two sons, for bilking billions from investors in his family-run cable TV system Adelphia Communications Corporation; and Marc Dreier, perpetrator of a $400 million Ponzi scheme. Madoff-related cases, too: JPMorgan Chase, without admitting any wrongdoing, agreed to pay $2 billion to the feds and defrauded Madoff investors in the

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The demonstration took many hundreds of the computer programs and procedures that had been used on the investment advisory side of Madoff Securities (where the Ponzi scheme lived and breathed) for a fifteen-year-period prior to the firm’s demise in 2008 and combined them into a boiled-down, interactive court

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his great epiphany and sorrow for the fact that he’d been stealing from people for thirty years, notwithstanding his realization that it was a Ponzi scheme—‘Oh my God!’—it didn’t mean he stopped stealing.” During that week of December 3, until Madoff’s arrest on the eleventh, DiPascali

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prison terms? Judge Swain gave many reasons for the sentences, among them that none of the defendants instigated the fraud or knew it was a Ponzi scheme; nor were they fundamentally corrupt or evil. But the biggest factor may have been DiPascali. During one of the sentencings, she hammered Frank, but

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. “And I think what is likely to happen going forward with the next fraud defendant,” he continued, “the next insider trading defendant, the next Ponzi scheme defendant, they are going to point to the sentences in this case, and they are going to say, ‘I didn’t participate in the Madoff

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the other frauds are kind of revolving around it. This was an entity [BLMIS] that was wholly corrupt to its core. There was a Ponzi scheme in the middle of this, but in order to keep that Ponzi running, there were a series of related but really fundamentally separate frauds that

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were done. But they were all in service of the Ponzi scheme. The accounting fraud that allowed them to move money up into the market making business [run by Peter, Andrew, and Mark] and prop it

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of the side frauds were really totally separate, like Madoff’s tax fraud. In addition to him taking in all this money illegitimately through a Ponzi scheme, he also failed to accurately report his income, even according to his own fake books. Q: Then you have Peter putting his wife on

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the opposite—but it does speak to her sense of entitlement. She apparently didn’t realize (or care) that once Bernie admitted it was a Ponzi scheme, the music must stop instantly. No use of the corporate credit card, and no withdrawals from bank accounts with funds that would need to

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on the road to being indicted before Mark’s suicide. I thought the evidence was there—not necessarily that they knew that it was a Ponzi scheme, but the way they were benefiting from certain transactions in their IA account statements. They would probably argue they never saw the statements.” In

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to protect people from poor investment decisions. Moreover, not one investor of Madoff’s ever complained to the SEC, which is almost always how prior Ponzi schemes were exposed. One Madoff investor who blames the SEC is Arline Altman. For many decades, she was a close friend of my aunt Adele

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Madoff investigation. “If this relationship began before or during the SEC OIG’s investigation into the SEC’s failure to uncover or prevent the Madoff Ponzi scheme,” reads the report, using the acronym for the Office of Inspector General, “then Kotz would have been in violation of CIGIE’s investigative standards

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XYZ steps, could you have uncovered the Ponzi?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, you’re hired!’ The answer is as follows: You can always uncover any Ponzi scheme if you dig deep enough. The question is, based on what you have, does it justify the resources? That’s the difficult measure.” Reisner, the

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“fractional shares” and “cash in lieu” in convertible arbitrage and is but one wiggly strand of the snakelike snarl that was Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Readers may conclude after this chapter that the comment by former federal judge and FBI Director Freeh in the book’s introduction—that he had

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his arrest. On its face, that sounds preposterous—and judges have so ruled—as it would certainly encourage investors to enter and stay in future Ponzi schemes. Chaitman’s centenarian client was claiming that he never received and deposited some “profit withdrawal” checks he had requested from BLMIS in the 1980s.

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of “cash in lieu of fractional shares” for the customers at the wrong time, prior to the actual conversion. But when you are running a Ponzi scheme, without the normal checks and balances of a company on Wall Street, who cares? “That’s just crazy!” exclaims Adams. “Because you don’t

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great harm and not feel bad about it,” explains Navarro. “They can be functional. They don’t have to be serial killers. Most of the Ponzi schemes were developed by psychopaths.” Was Bernie probably a psychopath? “From a pathological standpoint, he had traits in common with predators,” says Navarro. “Not just

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health crisis that cries out for attention. Do financial fraudsters such as Madoff rise to that same level? Why is it so that so many Ponzi schemes (although not yet of Madoff’s size) continue to proliferate, even as investors are warned time after time that if the financial returns claimed

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forty-six, after he hanged himself in his Manhattan apartment on December 11, 2010—the second anniversary of his father’s arrest for perpetrating the Ponzi scheme. “Nobody wants to believe the truth,” he said in an email to his attorney. 15. Andrew Madoff on 60 Minutes, October 30, 2011. His

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Annette Bongiorno exits the courthouse on March 24, 2014, with her attorney, Roland Riopelle, after her conviction on charges that she helped facilitate Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Poor Annette: FBI agents nicknamed their investigation of her “Operation Troll Hunt.” 22. Suited up: Madoff Five prosecutors Matthew Schwartz (left), Randall “Action” Jackson (

Bernie Madoff, the Wizard of Lies: Inside the Infamous $65 Billion Swindle

by Diana B. Henriques  · 1 Aug 2011  · 598pp  · 169,194 words

magazines in a half-dozen languages, caricatured in editorial cartoons everywhere. Even in an age of hyperbole, the story was beyond belief: a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme that lasted for decades, stretched around the globe, and ensnared some of the richest, wisest, and most respected people in the world. Thousands of

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Cacioppi poses questions and Madoff answers them. Speaking without visible emotion, Madoff confirms what he told his brother and sons: He has been operating a Ponzi scheme, paying returns to investors with “money that wasn’t there”—in reality, money taken from other investors. He is broke, insolvent. He knows it

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arbitrage strategies—large-scale trading that other firms could see and participate in, not the backdated fictional trading that would become the hallmark of his Ponzi scheme. There were certainly opportunities for riskless arbitrage that could have produced sizeable profits in those years. For example, between 1973 and 1992 the returns

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in their accounts from classic riskless arbitrage trades to the complex strategy that he would still be claiming to use until the moment before his Ponzi scheme collapsed twenty years later. His approach made even his most complicated arbitrage trades look simple. Some options traders called his new strategy a “bull

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DiPascali. But constructing those records was nursery room fraud compared with the task posed by the SEC investigation in the summer of 1992. If the Ponzi scheme was already up and running, as seems likely, Madoff had to produce trading records for seven Avellino & Bienes accounts that would show the necessary

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of November 1992. Madoff later acknowledged that this cash demand posed difficulties for him, although he denied it was because he was already running a Ponzi scheme. Rather, he claimed it was because the “bona fide arbitrage” positions in the Avellino & Bienes accounts, like the arcane “synthetic” trades in the accounts

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investigation in 1992, incomplete though it was, had significant consequences for Bernie Madoff’s expanding fraud. First, it forced Madoff to apply to his Ponzi scheme some of the computer technology he was already using in his legitimate business. It was simply impossible for Frank DiPascali to concoct manually the trading

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the Hamptons and Palm Beach. It was during these early days of cultivating Fairfield Greenwich—which almost certainly coincided with the early days of the Ponzi scheme—that Madoff and DiPascali perfected the talking points for their “split-strike conversion” investment strategy and tried them out on Tucker and Noel. It

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the sources of wealth familiar to the partners at Fairfield Greenwich—were critical in allowing Madoff to expand the pool of money available to his Ponzi scheme in the 1990s. Another increasingly important spigot was connected to the nonprofit world, whose endowments, educational institutions, foundations, and investment committees came to trust

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were indisputably the result of legitimate market activity, not fraud.) Still, Markopolos immediately and accurately concluded that Madoff was cheating somehow—either running a Ponzi scheme or using his knowledge of incoming orders to trade ahead of his customers and thereby benefit from the price changes caused by their transactions, an

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the face of these lame explanations, the Ivy executive theorized that Madoff was lying. Coming close (but not close enough) to the reality of the Ponzi scheme, the executive suspected that Madoff was really using investors’ money to finance his legitimate stock-trading business. The “investment earnings” credited to their accounts

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directly affected. . . . Tremont’s products will still see their reputations vaporized when Madoff rolls over like a big ship.” By 2002, Madoff’s hidden Ponzi scheme was booming. Fairfield Greenwich Group had more than $4 billion invested with him by then, and additional billions were pouring in from the Kingate funds

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far, than the people who were certainly villains, including Madoff himself. Besides the hidden pain that Picower’s cash demands were inflicting on Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the new century also brought unexpected pain to the Madoff family and the legitimate family business, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. In September 2002,

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such claims would seem preposterous; no one could have actually tried to verify Madoff’s customer accounts with the DTCC clearing-house without discovering the Ponzi scheme. But the affable Friehling apparently gave some comfort to the Optimal team. “David seemed surprised to hear Madoff Securities described as a secretive organization

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banks and other institutions, not by Madoff. Another program hijacked the monthly DTCC clearing-house records from the legitimate brokerage firm upstairs and added the Ponzi scheme’s bogus trades to it, producing a scrupulously accurate-looking DTCC report that Madoff could use to verify his fictional stock positions. The computer-

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a bank loan for $95 million. The proceeds, received ten days later, were supposedly for his legitimate business, but were promptly shifted into his Ponzi scheme’s dwindling account to cover continued withdrawal demands. A subsequent criminal indictment asserted that it was Dan Bonventre, who had worked at Madoff’s side

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director of operations. Prosecutors and regulators at the SEC later claimed that Bonventre had been falsifying records for years to prevent any trace of the Ponzi scheme from showing up on the ledgers of the legitimate Madoff business, a charge Bonventre also denied. As that legitimate business faltered in the late

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that she seemed “offended” by this. In fact, his questions were totally irrelevant: No knowledge of derivatives is required to investigate a Ponzi scheme. If it’s truly a Ponzi scheme, there are no derivatives; there’s just a liar with a bank account. In fact, Cheung’s previous experience might have been

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also were misled by their colleagues about the earlier Madoff investigations, none of which had actually addressed the question of whether he was running a Ponzi scheme. One man who supervised the 2005 examination claimed that Lamore and Ostrow had investigated “basically some of the same issues” and found nothing. Lamore

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convincing to keep the investigators offtrack for a while longer. Regulators and prosecutors later accused Dan Bonventre of spending this perilous January dealing with the Ponzi scheme’s worsening cash crisis, using another $54 million in government bonds from Carl Shapiro’s account as collateral for a $50 million bank loan

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Harry Markopolos and his analysis. They failed to do the tough homework of studying the files of previously bungled investigations. They knew little about Ponzi schemes and the people who built them. But with all their shortcomings, Madoff’s regulators got tantalizingly close to exposing him in the spring of

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allegedly was always handed over face-to-face, never mailed—was Kohn’s compensation for the billions of dollars she helped steer into Madoff’s Ponzi scheme over the years, the trustee claimed. Another lawsuit by the trustee would contend that Madoff’s small affiliate in London, Madoff Securities International Ltd,

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soon be offered by HSBC, Citibank, Fortis, Merrill Lynch, and several other global institutions—were also a significant milepost in the evolution of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Initially, people had invested with Madoff because they trusted him. In time, they invested because they trusted whichever prominent accountant, lawyer, or pension fund

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told me there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a ponzi scheme.” Luckily for the Ponzi scheme, Chase’s retail bankers had not increased either their scrutiny or their scepticism, so Madoff could still move billions of dollars in

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gruelling day. Privately, Bernie Madoff knows this news will further alarm his institutional investors, especially the overseas hedge funds he is fleecing through his Ponzi scheme. But no one without a crystal ball could know that this epic bail-out—detailed under outsize headlines in all the next day’s newspapers

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control; their unflappable leader, Bernie Madoff, will be under arrest; and they will both be under suspicion for allegedly helping him maintain the largest Ponzi scheme in history. 11 WAKING UP IN THE RUBBLE The day after the music stopped for Bernie Madoff, the long march began for his victims. Like

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as likely accomplices, refusing to accept that such intelligent, sophisticated people could have been fooled for so long by a crime as elementary as a Ponzi scheme. Major banks across Europe began issuing press releases: Banco Santander’s Optimal funds were invested with Bernard L. Madoff . . . Funds affiliated with UBS may

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hold somebody accountable. She focused her arguments on a knotty appellate case called In re New Times Security Services, which dealt with a much smaller Ponzi scheme liquidated by SIPC years earlier. It was a complex, muddled case that featured three sets of victims, each with distinctive circumstances; an internecine dispute

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slow, and bitterly adversarial SIPC liquidation in bankruptcy court. Clawback lawsuits were an integral part of bankruptcy court liquidation. Typically, the cash withdrawn before a Ponzi scheme collapses is the primary asset a trustee can find to settle claims. With luck, there may be some untapped bank or brokerage accounts, or some

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not been “completely derelict” in their professional duties. “Simply put, if the family members had been doing their jobs, honestly and faithfully, the Madoff Ponzi scheme might never have succeeded, or continued for so long,” the trustee’s brief argued. In a subsequent court filing, David Sheehan made the trustee’s

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the years leading up to Bernie Madoff’s arrest, the agency received at least six complaints suggesting that he was operating a Ponzi scheme. A basic step in detecting a Ponzi scheme is to verify trades or confirm the existence of assets. “Yet, at no time did the SEC ever verify Madoff’s

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boxy lectern between the two counsel tables. Sheehan was blunt and direct, as usual. Most of his opponents had argued that Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was different from other Ponzi schemes simply because it was a SIPC case. “They are wrong,” he said. They were ignoring the fact that the cherished final account

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he had until midnight on December 11, 2010, the second anniversary of Madoff’s arrest, to file lawsuits aimed at retrieving cash withdrawn from the Ponzi scheme. By late September, nearly a thousand clawback lawsuits were still making their way through his firm’s pipeline. They included little ones against Madoff cousins

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he and two other men—the indispensable Frank DiPascali and the negligent accountant David Friehling—had confessed. Five other people stood accused of sustaining the Ponzi scheme, but all had proclaimed their innocence and were preparing to fight the accusations in court. Prosecutors insisted at every opportunity that the criminal investigation was

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. And if this occurred, then this historically large, long, far-flung crime would have achieved another superlative. It would have produced the most remarkable Ponzi scheme recovery ever. For the Madoff victims, the record-setting Picower settlement delivered something that for two years had been even more elusive than justice: hope

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, scientific research, education—in short, to make the world better. So did Carl Shapiro, the Palm Beach philanthropist. Like the early investors in every Ponzi scheme, he received money that was taken from later victims and he used that money to endow hospitals, art museums, charitable services for needy people. Norman

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Jerome O’Hara and George Perez, as noted below. Bonventre denied all charges filed against him. 151 the amount of custom-designed software serving the Ponzi scheme: There is no legal dispute that these computer programs existed and were used to deceive regulators, accountants, and investors. The dispute is over who created

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Daniel Bonventre (hereafter SEC v. Bonventre), in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, providing additional details about his alleged role in the Ponzi scheme. 153 making the cash look like legal profits: Ibid., p. 14. 153 phoney ledger entries were created: Ibid., p. 2. 153 “The World’s

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Press Release of Irving H. Picard: Trustee for Liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities Seeks $1 Billion from Seven Global Financial Institutions in Madoff Ponzi Scheme,” Dec. 8, 2010. The actual complaints against the banks were filed under seal in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York

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., Exhibit 28. 194 the Madoffs’ small stucco town house: Details about the town house are from Alan Katz, “Madoff’s Three-Bedroom Riviera Retreat Belied Ponzi Scheme Role,” Bloom-berg news service, Jan. 8, 2009. The rest of the passage is based on confidential interviews. 195 a reassuring “Dear Investor” letter:

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Efrati, “Evidence to Charge Ruth Madoff Lacking,” Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2009. 284 investigators had found no evidence linking the sons to Madoff’s Ponzi scheme: Alex Berenson and Diana B. Henriques, “Inquiry Finds No Signs Family Aided Madoff,” New York Times, Dec. 16, 2008. 284 grew leery of including

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.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, pp. 23–24. 310 he stood accused of having conspired to sustain and conceal the Ponzi scheme: First Superseding Bonventre Indictment. 310 “I’m saying Dan Bonventre is absolutely innocent”: Diana B. Henriques, “Another Madoff Aide Faces Fraud Charges,” New York

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”: Press Release, “Trustee for Liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities Files Suit Against Sterling Equities, Its Partners and Other Related Entities Seeking Recoveries in Ponzi Scheme,” Dec. 7, 2010, accessible at www.madofftrustee.com. 319 some key details about the sealed lawsuit: Alison Leigh Cowan, Peter Lattman, Serge F. Kovaleski,

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against seven major banks: Press Release, “Trustee for Liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities Seeks $1 Billion from Seven Global Financial Institutions in Madoff Ponzi Scheme,” Dec. 8, 2010, accessible at www.madofftrustee.com. 319 lawsuits against smaller but notable hedge fund managers: Press Release, “Trustee for Liquidation of Bernard

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63–65, 132–36, 161–62, 333 Picower settlement and, 330–31 Ponzi scheme of, and legitimate firm, 136, 152–53, 160, 251 Ponzi scheme of, described to federal prosecutors, 225–27 Ponzi scheme of, enabled by Wall Street, xxiv Ponzi scheme of, seductiveness of, 339–40 Ponzi scheme of, size of, xxiii, 117, 180, 247, 260 prison interviews of

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Foundation, 211, 329 Piedrahita, Andrés, 108 Piedrahita, Corina Noel, 108 Pink Sheets, 26–27, 44–46 Pitt, Harvey, 327 Polaroid, 35 Pollard, Jonathan, 332 Ponzi schemes. See also Madoff, Bernard L. Bayou Group exposed as, 147–49 bull markets and, 25 Chaitment suit and liquidation rules for, 260–62 defined, 29

Planet Ponzi

by Mitch Feierstein  · 2 Feb 2012  · 393pp  · 115,263 words

, unknown, in a charity hospital in Rio de Janeiro. His was a useless, wasted, destructive life, but he gave his name to history. A Ponzi scheme is any financial adventure in which depositors can only be paid out by using the money of new investors. As long as the scheme is

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They made some of their investors a whole lot poorer, but the world didn’t come crashing down as a result. For that‌—‌for a Ponzi scheme that would threaten to bankrupt capitalism across the entire Western world‌—‌you need people much smarter than Ponzi or Madoff. You need time, you need

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you need Washington. This book begins with the story of how the politicians in Washington and the bankers on Wall Street jointly created the largest Ponzi scheme in history. The origins of that scheme go way back‌—‌at least three decades, if you think only of Wall Street, but arguably as

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, but I hope it doesn’t strike readers as entirely implausible. After all, just a few years ago in 2008–9, part of the Ponzi scheme was laid bare for all to see in the shape of the subprime mortgage bust and the consequent banking crisis. That crisis was already the

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largest Ponzi scheme in history, so the track record is there. As for what’s happening today, this book will attempt a patient accounting of the scheme,

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its debts, its losses, its strategies of concealment. In particular, we’ll find ourselves, again and again, running across the following ingredients, key to any Ponzi scheme: exponentially increasing liabilities‌—‌or, in plain English, rapidly mounting debt; crappy, nonexistent, or inadequate assets; deceitful or nonexistent accounting; feeble, inert, or toothless regulators;

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for years (if you’re Bernie Madoff), but gravity will always claim you in the end. The first phase of the collapse of our global Ponzi scheme came on September 15, 2008, when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code. (The earlier failure of

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the UK’s GDP. The Irish government undertook to guarantee its bank debt, thereby destroying its own creditworthiness. And so on. The private sector Ponzi scheme had stopped being able to bear the weight of its own creation. Round the world, governments‌—‌a cute way of saying you, the taxpayer‌—‌were

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the totally wrong to the hopelessly misleading. We’re going to get to the detailed arguments shortly, but for now, let’s keep it simple. Ponzi schemes are simple, remember. Their crappy hollowness is utterly obvious, if only you choose to look. The mistake lies in not looking. And if you

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But don’t think all this means that things are as bad as they ever were. They’re not. They’re worse‌—‌much worse. Remember: Ponzi schemes can only operate because of their merry-go-round nature. New dummies providing the influx of funds to pay out the old dummies. But with

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have gotten higher, the clean-up operation more horrendous. If you think I exaggerate, let’s take a quick tour of the first of our Ponzi scheme ingredients: exponentially increasing liabilities. If you ever see a set of figures which suggests exponentially increasing liabilities, you should think hard about whether or

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not you might be looking at a Ponzi scheme. A set of figures like those in figure 1.1, for instance. Figure 1.1: US federal debt outstanding, 1940–2010 Source: Bureau of

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graph suggests that: the finances of the US government are under control, which is what the government would want you to believe, or that a Ponzi scheme is approaching its final death-rattle. If you need a little help in answering that question, take a look at figure 1.2, which

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need to worry too much either way. The point is, net government spending was under control. Over on Wall Street, the first revolutions of the Ponzi scheme were getting under way, but in Washington, money was still reasonably sound (though there were, even then, huge accumulating liabilities which we’ll explore

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government borrowed in each of the years from 2009 to 2011 will need to be repaid. If it’s not repaid, it’s a Ponzi scheme‌—‌and a Ponzi scheme only ever ends one way. But let’s broaden the scope of our enquiry. This book isn’t about the US federal debt, or

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. Naturally, however, we’re going to have to examine these things in more detail. We’re going to take that list of ingredients for a Ponzi scheme and tick them off one by one. Overvalued assets? Check. Deceitful accounting? Uh-huh. Slothful regulators? You betcha. Nor will we confine ourselves to

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the US. The Ponzi scheme in America may be bad, but it’s a whole lot worse elsewhere‌—‌among major nations, I’d say that Japan, Italy, and Spain are

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. We won’t only look at mounting debts‌—‌the liability side of our global balance sheet; we’ll look at the asset side too. Ponzi schemes are reliant on an ever-swelling basket of hopelessly misvalued assets. When we turn to look at some of the major markets around today, we

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. Sometimes technicalities matter. Finally, Part Four looks at ‘Solutions.’ That’s a bad title, actually: there are no solutions. You don’t solve a Ponzi scheme; you end it. That means huge deleveraging resulting in huge losses: the resulting, wrenching dislocations are inevitable. There was no way the authorities could make

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kicking. But before we figure out how to handle that moment when it comes, let’s turn back to the origin of everything. How the Ponzi scheme started. What keeps it going. How the whole thing is still in place, still revolving, still expanding‌—‌and getting ever closer to the final

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to be put aside to create that income has shifted from employees to employer. That’s only the first move of the government’s Pension Ponzi scheme, however. After all, defined benefit schemes used to be very popular in the private sector too, and private sector employers were generally careful to

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best seen as bankrupt, thereby threatening countless past and present employees who depend on them for their retirement income.3 That’s the thing about Ponzi schemes: when they collapse they hurt people, and the bigger you build the scheme, the more people you’re going to injure. If you’re

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in 20 years, but not big enough to handle this size load year after year. This is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at

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under U.S. President Richard Nixon, coined an oft-repeated phrase: ‘Something that can’t go on, will stop.’ True enough. Uncle Sam’s Ponzi scheme will stop. But it will stop too late. And it will stop in a very nasty manner. The first possibility is massive benefit cuts visited

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care about? That question is the one we turn to next. 5 How to win friends and influence people One of the notable features of Ponzi schemes‌—‌the point of them, in fact‌—‌is that they make their promoters very, very rich. Charles Ponzi bought a bank and thought about buying

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stolen money he relied upon. If we’re claiming that the US government and (as we’ll come to see) Wall Street are running huge Ponzi schemes, we should expect to find some beneficiaries: the Charles Ponzis, the Bernie Madoffs. Following the collapse of the mortgage market in 2008, it’s

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available by the Senate Office of Public Records. The sums involved are not small and, as you’d expect from the accelerating nature of any Ponzi scheme, are growing fast. At the start of the millennium, the amount of money spent lobbying Washington every year was around $1.5 billion; over

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made, or ever come across in the normal, ethical course of business. That’s the kind of return which has the whiff of a Ponzi scheme to me. The same whiff hangs around Fortune magazine’s estimate that Lockheed earned a return on its political investment of 163,536% since 1999

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been. Your money was placed at risk to protect Wall Street bonuses. How do you feel about that? These tales point to one further moral. Ponzi schemes are, by their nature, vastly wasteful; it’s almost as though their boastful extravagance provides them with camouflage. In AIG’s case, the US

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confirms it.13 * So much for the US government’s money management. But before we turn to the second engine that has powered the Ponzi scheme we’re examining‌—‌Wall Street‌—‌we should step across the pond to take a quick look at how public finance in the UK has fared

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of capitalism to have consistently super-sized profits despite continual aggressive competition; or those pumped-up profits are a mirage‌—‌or, in plain language, a Ponzi scheme. Your choices are broadly similar when seeking to account for the bizarrely large proportion of financially derived profits found in the accounts of nonfinancial corporations

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Feierstein has his figures quite correct, but there is some other perfectly innocent explanation of these data‌—‌we don’t need to invoke a giant Ponzi scheme. If you had doubts along these lines, congratulations. I don’t want you to take things on trust. Taking too much on trust is

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follows is a specific illustration of a general phenomenon. Until these general issues are addressed, we have a financial system which is more like a Ponzi scheme than a useful tool for the effective deployment of capital. What we have, in fact, is not a socially useful asset; it’s a

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mortgage risk was apparently not enough; Wall Street had to artificially create more from thin air. Many of these synthetic schemes were little more than Ponzi schemes, which pretended to offer AAA-rated assets and in practice were lethally weakened by the shoddiness of their underlying assets. The creators of those

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t experienced a bank run for 150 years suggests that those precautions were hardly unknown to Ridley’s predecessors. But in the era of the Ponzi scheme, why burden yourself with common sense, when you can just press the pedal to the metal and see how far you can travel before

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theory has no way of explaining how those huge profits seem to arrive year after year after year. If the whole thing is just a Ponzi scheme, economic theory can breathe a sigh of relief. But if the phony profits are hidden in plain view, where is the mountain of buried

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that’s the task they give me‌—‌but it also involves staying a long way away from investments that I see as little better than Ponzi schemes. (I stayed a long way away from mortgage products and routinely turn down investments which I regard as their contemporary successors.) But so what?

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this‌—‌the negative equity, the distressed sales, the unsold homes, the falling prices‌—‌is happening while the Fed desperately attempts to keep the great American Ponzi scheme alive for as long as possible. Interest rates are at historic lows. Mortgage rates have tracked them down. In our inflationary times, this monetary

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, 2000–2011 Source: ThomsonReuters. We’re just about done on equity markets. The simple truth, once again, is that the assets promised by a Ponzi scheme are worth vastly less than they purport to be. Your house is worth less than the Ponzi-sellers suggested. Your equities and pension are worth

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out the improbably large profits recorded by the financial sector in the US. Those profits alone would provide compelling evidence of a giant financial sector Ponzi scheme. The huge destruction of value that has taken place since 2008 (and which still has some way to run) comprises the inevitable corollary of

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in excess of the net assets (mostly cash) on its balance sheet.3 That doesn’t mean that Apple is running some kind of huge Ponzi scheme; it simply means that Apple has some wonderful products, a terrific brand, and a dominant position in some of the hottest consumer segments of

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Germany, Italy, and Spain have made effectively no provision at all for their aging populations. In effect, all four of these countries are running huge Ponzi schemes where current retirees are taking money from future retirees. When those future retirees come to draw their pensions, they’re likely to find that there

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’s no money left to look after them. That’s the nature of Ponzi schemes: they always end up causing injury, and the bigger the scheme, the bigger the injury. That Italy and (to a lesser degree) Spain are

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think they are. What’s less obvious, however, from the data presented above is that America, Canada, Britain, and Japan are also running huge Ponzi schemes. (I don’t have the data that would enable me to comment on South Korea.) For one thing, there’s often a lot less in

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salary. Does that sound like an attractive recipe for retirement to you? Or does it sound like the bitter joke at the end of a Ponzi scheme?11 Needless to say, because Western populations are rapidly aging, the probable future pension bills are mounting. Estimates of the sums involved range from

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had adopted this courageous position, but instead they took what everyone born on Planet Ponzi does: they kicked the can down the road. And because Ponzi schemes only survive by expanding, every time you kick the can down the road, you create a bigger problem than you had before. In short,

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, but a turn in the currency could precipitate a rapid change in mood. We haven’t reached that tipping point yet, but remember: all Ponzi schemes feel OK while you’re in them. But they implode fast, and catastrophically. The ratings agencies are already starting to warn of the problem‌—‌and

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or 30%. They’re going to have to watch taxes rise, banks lose headcount, businesses struggle, unemployment rise. These things are the consequences of any Ponzi scheme played out on the scale and duration of this one, but they’re inevitably unpopular. And at some point, in some countries, given the scale

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bit dizzy. So let’s summarize. Twenty or thirty years ago, the world went crazy. Wall Street started to turn itself into a giant Ponzi scheme. Washington started to rack up uncountably large‌—‌and wholly unpayable‌—‌obligations that now total somewhere between $80 and $200 trillion.1 The other nations of

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the world chose, more or less, to follow suit. As the Ponzi scheme started to collapse, it inaugurated what is certainly the greatest and most dangerous recession since the 1930s. In normal recessions, output tends to spring back

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that manage to handle their affairs‌—‌to educate their kids, provide health care to their sick, pay pensions to their elderly‌—‌without creating some tottering Ponzi scheme of debt. The British government is seeking to creep back to sound finances and sound banking right now. These things are possible today. They’

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition

by Kindleberger, Charles P. and Robert Z., Aliber  · 9 Aug 2011

overlapping terms for non-sustainable patterns of financial behavior, in that asset prices today are not consistent with asset prices at distant future dates. The Ponzi schemes generally involve promises to pay an interest rate of 30 or 40 or 50 percent a month; the entrepreneurs that develop these schemes always claim

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theft of private information before it becomes publicly available. Some of the fraud is personal, some is corporate. Bernie Madoff ran one of the largest Ponzi schemes ever, investors lost more than $20 billion. The owners of some business conglomerates in Iceland had ‘captured’ control of the banks and then borrowed from

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price developments. 7 Bernie Madoff: Frauds, Swindles, and the Credit Cycle Charlie Ponzi is the most famous banker in American history, immortalized in the term ‘Ponzi scheme’. Ponzi owned a small firm that sold deposits in one of the Boston suburbs in the early 1920s; he promised to pay the buyers of

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of their money, and unfortunately, the money wasn’t there. Ponzi went to jail. His scheme flourished for eighteen months. Bernie Madoff managed the largest Ponzi scheme in American history; at the time of the collapse in December 2008 the liabilities were reported to be $50 billion or $64 billion – although the

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.) Madoff had run the scheme for twenty years, so he may hold the world’s record for both the largest and the most long-lived Ponzi scheme. Every Ponzi scheme has a ‘story’ – an explanation for why the firm earns such high returns. Ponzi himself said he was arbitraging international postal reply coupons. (You

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living expenses. And they generally sell their most liquid securities because they can’t bear to take the large losses associated with selling illiquid assets. Ponzi schemes tend to be personal, and the basic crime is that the promoters – Madoff excepted – almost always make promises about exceptionally high rates of returns from

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large loans to rulers for political reasons, which eased its regulatory problems and helped it expand. BCCI may have been one of the largest-ever Ponzi schemes in the pre-Madoff days. Non-performing loans were refinanced, in effect delaying the recognition of losses. Some of BCCI’s loans to a shipping

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have the price of its stock increase continuously. And it needed both increases at an accelerating rate as in a chain letter or in a Ponzi scheme.23 History has given less immortality to certain of Ponzi’s forerunners. The former Munich actress Spitzeder paid 20 percent a year interest on the

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York: Knopf, 1927), p. 34. 69. Rosenberg, Weltwirtschaftskrise, pp. 50, 100–1. See also Stewart L. Weisman, Need and Greed: the Story of the Largest Ponzi Scheme in American History (Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 1999). 70. Carswell, South Sea Bubble, p. 171. 71. Ibid., pp. 140, 155. 72. Ibid., p. 159

No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller

by Harry Markopolos  · 1 Mar 2010  · 431pp  · 132,416 words

No one would listen : a true financial thriller / Harry Markopolos. p. cm. Includes index. eISBN : 978-0-470-62576-7 1. Madoff, Bernard L. 2. Ponzi schemes—United States. 3. Investment advisors—Corrupt practices—United States. 4. Hedge funds—United States. 5. Securities fraud—United States—Prevention. 6. United States. Securities and

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under its own weight, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which was charged with stopping fraud and protecting investors, could not assume an ostrich defense. Ponzi schemes exist in stable disequilibrium. This means that while they can’t ultimately succeed, they can persist indefinitely—until they don’t. Just the fact that

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in history. Kotz, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) inspector general, was investigating the total failure of his agency to expose Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme—even after I’d warned the SEC about it in five separate submissions over a nine-year period. Kotz and his deputy, Noelle Frangipane, sat

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of the screen reported that Bernard Madoff, a legendary Wall Street figure and the former chairman of NASDAQ had been arrested for running the largest Ponzi scheme in history. The developer sat silently for several seconds, absorbing that news. No, that couldn’t be right, he thought, but the message streamed

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amount of money as chief investment officer of DKH Investments in Boston. “Harry,” his message said clearly, “Madoff is in federal custody for running a Ponzi scheme. He’s under arrest in New York. Call me.” My heart started racing. The second message was also from a close friend, Andre Mehta,

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fraud. There were no investments, he had told them; there never had been. Instead, for more than two decades, he had been running the largest Ponzi scheme in history. His sons had immediately informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and agents had shown up at Madoff’s apartment early that morning

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Greek geek. And this, then, is the complete story of how my team failed to stop the greatest financial crime in history, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. For the previous nine years I had been working secretly with three highly motivated men who worked in various positions in the financial industry to

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Months after Madoff’s collapse, the FBI would reveal to my team that based on our 2005 submission providing evidence that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme, the SEC finally launched an investigation—but that its crack investigative team during the two-year-long investigation “never even figured out there was a

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time it took to ask Madoff three questions for his fraud to be discovered and his operation to be shut down. The magnitude of this Ponzi scheme is matched only by the willful blindness of the SEC to investigate Madoff. This was not my first fraud investigation. My first investigation, which

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of selling the Brooklyn Bridge to tourists, the infamous con man Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil, or even the legendary Charles Ponzi. The mechanics of a Ponzi scheme are pretty simple. People are offered an opportunity to invest in a business that seems real and even logical—it’s often a business that

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in the fictitious companies he created. In 2003, Reed Slatkin, cofounder of Internet service provider EarthLink, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for a Ponzi scheme that swindled investors out of approximately $250 million. In 2008, a Minnesota businessman named Tom Petters was accused by the government of swindling investors out

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that Petters was likely to be a fraud. There were several reasons I believed almost right from the beginning that Madoff’s operation was a Ponzi scheme rather than front-running or even something more creative. We found out quickly that Madoff was continually on the prowl for new money—although obviously

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willingly invest in my product.” So creating a financial product wasn’t the problem; the problem was creating a product that could compete with a Ponzi scheme. In the spring of 2000, less than six months after we had first encountered Bernie Madoff, my anger at being forced into that position became

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process other than the one being advertised, in which case an investigation is in order; or (3) the entire case is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme.” As I explained, “My firm’s marketing department has asked our investment department to duplicate Madoff’s ‘split-strike conversion’ strategy in hopes of duplicating

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Frank revealed the details of the investigation. His whole operation was a scam, he said. Madoff was either front-running or it was the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. Like a good reporter, Ocrant casually absorbed the information. He didn’t really respond, but in fact his reaction was typical; he

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tip about New Jersey currency traders who were regularly returning as much as 20 percent a month. It had all the hallmarks of a classic Ponzi scheme. After gathering evidence that this was indeed a scam, he phoned the company and requested an interview with either or both of the two

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seemed like a very personable, nice, straightforward guy.” The only question that Ocrant had decided not to ask directly was: ‘Are you running a massive Ponzi scheme?’ He was afraid those words might end the interview. Instead he danced around it, asking him about front-running—which Madoff denied, naturally. Years later

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, after Madoff had surrendered and his Ponzi scheme had collapsed, people would wonder how Madoff could have fooled so many people for so long. This interview provides a good answer to that question

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. Mike Ocrant is a very good investigative reporter. He has uncovered other Ponzi schemes, he has broken numerous other important stories, and he has won prestigious awards; in his career he has conducted a thousand interviews with powerful executives

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derivatives investment scheme that few investors (or regulators) would be capable of comprehending lead to a weight of the evidence conclusion that this is a Ponzi scheme.” I went through a lot of mathematical data, trying to simplify it wherever possible, but understanding did require at least a basic comprehension of the

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agency. In fact, we later found out that none of these people, Cheung, Bachenheimer, or their assistant, enforcement attorney Simona Suh, had ever investigated a Ponzi scheme. They wouldn’t have known what to look for, and as part of the bureaucracy they didn’t want to look unqualified or unprepared by

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answers, making it obvious the whole thing was a fraud. Integral didn’t know the first thing about options. Integral was basically a much smaller Ponzi scheme than Madoff, but we were too deeply entrenched in Bernie to take on another fight. Its founder, Conrad Seghers, was convicted of violating the antifraud

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well run HFOF can provide a diversified portfolio and generate attractive returns for their investors. While too many HFOFs got caught up in the Madoff Ponzi scheme, I applaud those organizations that did their homework and helped their investors avoid this disaster. In the United States, almost 11 percent of the

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was over for him. Finally, on December 10, 2008, he supposedly told his two sons that his investment business was a fraud, “Basically, a giant Ponzi scheme.” Early the following morning, December 11, 2008, two FBI agents knocked on his front door and asked him if there was an innocent explanation. He

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shook his head. “There is no innocent explanation.” The two agents immediately placed him under arrest. The largest Ponzi scheme in history had finally collapsed. Chapter 8 Closing the Biggest Barn Door in Wall Street History The moment they put the handcuffs on Madoff, my

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their karate lesson. It was while I was waiting for them at the dojo that my life changed. Madoff had admitted he was running a Ponzi scheme. Madoff had been arrested. Billions of dollars were gone. The whole financial industry was shaken. People were panicking. After dealing with the initial shock,

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financial market research. “Did you hear?” “Hear what?” “You were right,” he said. “Your story was totally right. Madoff just got arrested for running a Ponzi scheme. You’re the man!” Seven years too late, Mike thought, seven years too late. A few minutes later he called Frank, who was talking to

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Officially, I was going to appear before the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government-Sponsored Enterprises for a hearing entitled “Assessing the Madoff Ponzi Scheme and Regulatory Failures”—which was the polite way of saying “How the SEC Screwed Millions of People.” My only concern was that I would be

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resources meant they could respond to only the highest-priority matters—which of course was their attempt to excuse their failures. “If a $50 billion Ponzi scheme doesn’t make the SEC’s priority list,” I responded, “then I want to know who sets their priorities.” I was just getting started,

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institutional investors in Madoff were also Neil’s competition. Neil was actually better off watching his competition make the horrendous mistake of investing in a Ponzi scheme. But for Neil, exposing Madoff was simply the right thing to do. As Gaytri walked out of the session, she noticed a tall, lanky

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finally fulfilling its responsibility, in the first half of 2009 it filed “more than twice as many emergency temporary restraining orders this year related to Ponzi schemes and other frauds as compared to the same period last year.” I think it is fair and accurate to claim that this restructuring never would

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whole story: The SEC’s 1992 Investigation of Avellino & Bienes, “SEC Contacted Avellino and Suspected That Avellino & Bienes Was Selling Unregistered Securities and Running a Ponzi Scheme.” SEC Review of 2000 and 2001 Markopolos Complaints: “Markopolos Approached the SEC’s Boston Office in May 2000 with Evidence That Madoff Was Operating a

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claim. Reading this, it almost makes me wonder why the SEC believed Bernie Madoff when he claimed to be the mastermind of a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. If they had needed any more clues, they received an anonymous letter in March 2008, apparently mailed from the New York Public Library, which concluded

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the allegations in it.” Kotz’s conclusion was obvious: The SEC never took “the basic and necessary steps to determine if Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme,” and if it had it could have uncovered the scheme “well before Madoff confessed.” Personally, after reading all 457 pages of this report I have

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even operate one Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips franchise without assistance. This was a $65 billion international scam that operated successfully for decades. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was too large an operation for one person to have done it by himself—unless you’re talking about Superman, of course. And truthfully, Bernie

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the story of our investigation became public, each member of the team began receiving letters and tips offering evidence of other financial frauds, including several Ponzi schemes. I’ve gotten a large pile of them that allege frauds in a variety of industries. Unfortunately, I’m so busy with active cases that

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is gone directly to the SEC database on their computers to see if the red flags I raised were comparable to information learned about other Ponzi schemes. Unfortunately, that would have been impossible because there is no existing SEC database like that. The SEC should build a strong online knowledge center

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the assets are being diverted to pay offinvestors. Yet this case was assigned to SEC staffers who had absolutely no experience and little knowledge of Ponzi schemes, and they really had no place within the SEC to go to learn about them. To further increase the SEC’s auditing effectiveness, I

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deposits instead of issuing unregulated Ponzi Notes to his investors, the State Banking Commission would have quickly shut him down. The key to a successful Ponzi Scheme is to promise lucrative returns but to do so in an unregulated area of the capital markets. Hedge funds are not due to fall under

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returns are real but the stated investment strategy is illegal and based solely on insider-trading. NOTE: I am pretty confident that BM is a Ponzi Scheme, but in the off chance he is front-running customer orders and his returns are real, then this case qualifies as insider-trading under

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derivatives investment scheme that few investors (or regulators) would be capable of comprehending lead to a weight of the evidence conclusion that this is a Ponzi Scheme. 11. Red Flag # 14: Madoff subsidizes down months! Hard to believe (and I don’t believe this) but I’ve heard two FOF’s

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investors in down months, so that they will be able to show a low volatility of returns. These types of stories are commonly found around Ponzi Schemes. These investors tell me that Madoff only books winning tickets in their accounts and “eats the losses” during months when the market sells off hard

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Rampart London based funds of funds avoids Bernie Madoff on Madoff operations meets Mike Ocrant meets Paul H. Broyhill meets Scott Franzblau and mobsters on Ponzi scheme on Ponzi scheme vs. front-running post Bernie Madoff arrest public acknowledgment of role and Rene-Thierry de la Villehuchet on reporting to SEC on reverse engineering

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Rampart continued activities of early career of impact of Bernie Madoff case on information gathering leaves Rampart OPRA tapes on payment for order flow on Ponzi scheme vs. front-running post Bernie Madoff arrest public acknowledgment of role on quants on reporting to SEC reviews strategy analysis role of talks to Amit

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Fairfield Greenwich Sentry Fund False Claims Act cases Fax machines Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Feeder funds Fielder, David Financial frauds. See also front-running; Ponzi schemes Financial industry functions Financial industry practices Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Financial investigations Financial products Financial regulators Firearms Firearms permit Flaghac, François de Forbes Fortune

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Bernie Fraud examiners Fraud investigation. See also Markopolos, Harry; Taxpayers Against Fraud; whistleblowers Fraud investigation team Friehling, Dave Fritz, Jeff Front-running Front-running vs. Ponzi scheme Fund investment levels Fund sizes Gabelli, Mario Galvin, William Gamma Garrett, Scott Garrity, Mike competency of public acknowledgment of role support from Givenchy family Global

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Chuck Holland, Daniel E. Home security Hootman, Debbi House Finance Services Committee Housing bubble Hyrb, Greg Income Incompetence vs. corruption Incredibly consistent profitable returns. See Ponzi schemes Indirect investors Individual investors Information risk Insider information Inspector General findings investigation report review See also Kotz, David Institutional Investor Integral Investment Management fund Internal

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry

by William K. Black  · 31 Mar 2005  · 432pp  · 127,985 words

losses into fictional profits (Black 1993b). It can also mean, however, targeting poorly regulated industries. They can make the firm grow rapidly and become a Ponzi scheme. The result is a dangerous package that appears healthy and legitimate but is not and that has extraordinary resources available for use by a fraudulent

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that massively overvalues assets in order to create fictitious income and hide real losses. Control frauds grow rapidly (Black 1993d). The worst control frauds are Ponzi schemes, named after Carlo Ponzi, an early American fraud. A Ponzi must bring in new money continuously to pay off old investors, and the fraudster pockets

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a percentage of the take. The record “income” that the accounting fraud produces makes it possible for the Ponzi scheme to grow. S&Ls made superb control frauds because deposit insurance permitted even insolvent S&Ls to grow. The high-tech bubble of the 1990s

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quickly produced a glut of commercial real estate in markets where the control frauds were dominant (Texas and Arizona were the leading examples). Moreover, being Ponzi schemes, they increased their speculative real estate loans even as vacancy rates reached record levels and real estate values collapsed. Waves of control frauds produce bubbles

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them. The irony is that although Wall desperately wished to avoid closing S&Ls like Lincoln Savings, he never understood that he was dealing with Ponzi schemes. As a result, he never understood the need to change the rule limiting growth. The control frauds that Gray lacked the funds to close collapsed

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legislation and rulemaking, and the details are not important to this book. This deregulation was harmful—it was critical to making S&Ls the ideal Ponzi scheme—but it was also essential. Unless the nation was prepared to extend interest rate controls to money market funds (which was impossible politically and would

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” they could report. This thousand-to-one leverage opportunity was one of keys to the astonishing growth that made the control frauds ideal vehicles for Ponzi schemes and imposed horrific damages on taxpayers. Every $1 million in fraudulent accounting income could put the taxpayers at risk by an additional $1 billion. I

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them worse by lowering the nominal capital requirement and encouraging fictitious accounting income. The final three key acts of deregulation made construction lending the ideal Ponzi scheme. Pratt’s fifth step was allowing federally chartered S&Ls to place a much higher portion of their assets (40 percent) in construction lending. Sixth

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the insolvent S&L could grow and use new deposits to pay interest on old deposits. The administration encouraged insolvent S&Ls to engage in Ponzi schemes. Mehle was not on a frolic of his own; he testified for the administration. Mehle’s second act was even more amazing. While still the

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. An insolvent S&L that was closed on Friday afternoon would reopen on Monday morning. Deposit brokers fueled the growth that made control frauds ideal Ponzi schemes. An S&L could raise hundreds of millions of dollars in as little as three days through the brokers. The Bank Board and the FDIC

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, and he took no action to stop the large number of S&Ls that began to grow rapidly. The results were, predictably, disastrous. THE ADC PONZI SCHEME The proposed net worth rule restricted growth by increasing capital requirements for faster growing S&Ls. Gray proposed to reverse the Bank Board’s prior

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. Gray acted because of the tendency of fast growers to become the worst failures. The agency did not understand the acquisition, development, and construction (ADC) Ponzi scheme fully when it drafted the rule. This was ironic because the rule struck the control frauds’ Achilles’ heel and proved the most critical act of

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reregulation. A Ponzi scheme operates by growing rapidly and using a portion of the new money brought in to pay off the old investors while the fraudster pockets the

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investment. This makes their audit partners’ consistent treatment of them as true loans all the more disturbing. Cash moved in one direction in an ADC Ponzi scheme: out of the S&L to the developer. The developer typically did not provide an S&L control fraud with any cash—no down payment

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not think like white-collar criminals. Control frauds operate by different, perverse rules that harm society, but that does not mean they are irrational. A Ponzi scheme invariably collapses, but that does not mean that the fraud fails: the corrupt CEO can make a great deal of money looting the company. The

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purported profitability of the Ponzi schemes, combined with deposit insurance, meant that S&Ls could grow rapidly for several years before they collapsed. Such CEOs did not have the option of

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“Thrift Financial Reports.” Everyone agrees that ADC lending caused the worst losses, yet OPER never gathered data on ADC lending and never studied the ADC Ponzi schemes.12 OPER posed two other problems: its staff reflexively opposed re-regulation, and they were not very good at translating economics into English. That was

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during Wall’s chairmanship, and their political power would have endangered the nation. THE CATASTROPHE GRAY SO NARROWLY AVERTED Because S&L control frauds were Ponzi schemes, the consequences of delay in stopping their growth were horrific. Without Gray’s war on the control frauds, their growth would have increased throughout his

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interest improperly.) An S&L industry with over $6 trillion in assets, and more than half those assets held by control frauds engaged in ADC Ponzi schemes, would have caused trillions of dollars in losses directly to the taxpayers and would have injured national real estate markets badly enough to gravely damage

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on what was really happening in Texas. Joe Selby and I made a joint presentation to another group of staffers. We explained how an ADC Ponzi scheme works. We knew the presentations were effective because of the staffers’ reactions. The folks who were not active proponents of forbearance were very impressed, but

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the law passed. Wall and Martin faced disgrace if they stopped ACC’s junk bond sales. The junk bond sales to the widows were a Ponzi scheme. ACC was insolvent and losing money. If the Bank Board stopped the sales, ACC would fail within weeks because it could not pay its debts

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while Wall was Bank Board chairman. Forbearance delayed these collapses and materially increased the ultimate cost to the taxpayers, but it could not save these Ponzi schemes. In short, Wall and Martin did considerable damage, but they would have done vast damage had they preceded Gray instead of following him. Both Pratt

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on covering up the scope of the crisis • Barred Pratt from briefing the cabinet finance committee • Argued in favor of running insolvent S&Ls like Ponzi schemes • Repeatedly cut the number of examiners • Fought the agency’s use of the FHLB system to double the number of examiners and supervisors at no

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are impressed when you link their insights to an aspect of another field with an unforeseen connection and show that the combination produces an elegant Ponzi scheme. Because I saw every failure, I was among the first to see the emerging failure pattern. The central fact about the high fliers is that

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a security makes it appear less risky; a bond that appears less risky rises in value. This is not a claim that Drexel ran a Ponzi scheme or that junk bonds were worthless. They were, however, materially overvalued. That made Milken a rich man, even after he was released from prison. This

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. See also acquisition, development, and construction (ADC) loans; Big 8; California S&Ls; “cash for trash”; daisy chain; deregulation; Dixon, Donald; high flier; Keating, Charles; Ponzi scheme; “straw”; Texas S&Ls Cranston, Alan, 95, 104, 161, 200, 207, 236, 238. See also Keating, Charles: and Keating Five Crawford, William, 1, 13, 63

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, 38–39 Peat, Marwick, 250, 301n7 Peterson, Richard, 102, 116 Phelan report, 125–126, 148 Phoenician, 210 Pitt, Harvey, 252, 261 Pontell, Henry, xvi, 256 Ponzi scheme, xiv, 3–5, 8, 30–34, 43, 59, 194, 221, 233, 254, 259, 262, 287nn14,16. See also acquisition, development, and construction (ADC) loans Popejoy

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud

by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman  · 17 Jul 2023  · 329pp  · 99,504 words

invested, the more prices rose, resulting in even more FOMO that drew in yet more people—a self-reinforcing dynamic common to economic bubbles and Ponzi schemes. Quite simply, crypto had gone viral. In his 2019 book Narrative Economics, Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Shiller examined how economic narratives spread by drawing

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horizon. Surveying the markets in the spring of 2021, I saw all the signs of what Robert Shiller describes as “naturally occurring Ponzi schemes.” The premise of a traditional Ponzi scheme is quite simple: A fraudster promises investors he can produce incredible returns if they give him money to invest on their behalf. Instead

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wise up to the fraud and demand their money back, only to discover it isn’t there. Ponzi schemes are traditionally thought of as having a central figure coordinating the fraud. Think of Bernie Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme collapsed during the subprime crisis as investors saw the broader market cratering. By conventional measurements, Madoff

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’s fraud holds the record for the largest Ponzi scheme in history, with some $64 billion lost—at least on paper. But as

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Shiller describes in Irrational Exuberance (2015), a Ponzi scheme does not need to have a central administrator to fit the broader definition of one

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to refuse redemptions for any reason. This is the crimson flag when it comes to fraud, especially Ponzi schemes. Again, from Dan Davies’s book Lying for Money, “a fraud can be called a Ponzi scheme with greater validity, the greater the extent to which the mechanics of the crime revolve around managing the

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’t allowed back in the club. Madoff was so adept in perpetuating a stigma around the redemption process that he was able to run his Ponzi scheme successfully for decades. It was the financial crisis of 2008 that brought him down. With markets crashing, his investors grew nervous and wanted to take

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them I regarded as heroes—or at least the closest thing to it in an industry in which it seemed most people would sell a Ponzi scheme to their mother if it would help pump their bags. Bitfinex’ed—whoever he was!—was our initial ambassador to this new community, but he

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of its tokens, it was an object of extreme speculation and rumor within the crypto-skeptic world. Many people suspected that it was yet another Ponzi scheme. Some government agencies shared those suspicions, with Celsius facing legal action in multiple states: New Jersey, Alabama, and even Texas. To set up a promo

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Tether, its legal problems, its improbably high yield rates, its executives’ apparent connections to Israeli money launderers, and maybe whether it all was a giant Ponzi scheme. Jacob and our friend, the journalist Ed Ongweso Jr., slunk off to the corner, sitting in a couple chairs obscured by large plants from where

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circular flow of money common to such schemes. Where was the 20 percent return on Anchor coming from? There were multiple red flags of a Ponzi scheme: an impossibly high rate of return marketed as low risk, a complex strategy to achieve said returns, and unregulated products sold in an unregulated marketplace

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each other. Everyone was punching wildly, with SBF criticizing Binance and CZ suing a magazine publisher for a cover line that read “Changpeng Zhao’s Ponzi Scheme.” That was along with accusations of market manipulation, fears of government intervention, and more rumors than even a gossip-hound like me could handle. And

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response, SBF described DeFi staking pools as magic boxes out of which money was created. Bloomberg’s hosts said that sounded, at best, like a Ponzi scheme. Sam agreed. Sam started DMing Jacob on Twitter, trying to convince him—for reasons we could not quite figure out—that Tether wasn’t a

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spoke to him in March, Alex Mashinsky of Celsius had estimated that number at less than 15 percent—and that guy was allegedly running a Ponzi scheme that soon went bankrupt. He might have been exaggerating; it was probably even less. While Sam Bankman-Fried was busy buying up companies (and their

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a significant number of retirees. One elderly widow wrote that while she understood crypto’s volatility, she was not aware she was investing in a Ponzi scheme. “The devastation to my life situation is irreparable, its despair, hopelessness, its failure, a slow death, that eats at you every minute of the day

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that there was no product or service provided by crypto companies, they strongly resembled a particular type of illegal security: the Ponzi scheme. That’s right, in the eyes of the law, Ponzi schemes are a form of securities fraud and therefore regulated by the SEC. The agency lists seven “red flags” for Ponzis

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sold more than six million CEL tokens, for which Mashinsky received about $12 million worth of USDC stablecoins. It was clear that, besides being a Ponzi scheme run by some truly unimpressive operators, Celsius was a money machine for the Mashinskys. Whatever crypto rewards Mashinsky may have been returning to his customers

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and misleading stories about Celsius and almost never covered any positive news.” The cognitive dissonance was bewildering: What was there positive to say about a Ponzi scheme? James tried to keep himself anonymous online. Dirty Bubble Media provided a shield, a barrier between his day-to-day life and that of his

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in an industry built on unscrupulous practices and verbal agreements. KeyFi sued Celsius, claiming the company committed fraud—the lawsuit called the whole thing a Ponzi scheme—and failed to pay him for $838 million in profits he allegedly generated. Celsius decided to countersue, arguing that Stone had pocketed millions of dollars

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. But it was a typical example of crypto hubris—like Do Kwon launching Terra 2.0 just weeks after the collapse of his $50 billion Ponzi scheme devastated so many retail traders. It was ridiculous to think that anyone could rescue Celsius, so of course Mashinsky thought he was the one to

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comments by Sam suddenly seemed ripe for reinterpretation. Earlier in the year, in an interview with Bloomberg, he had acknowledged that DeFi staking pools were Ponzi schemes. He didn’t seem to care. In a Forbes interview in June, he had said that some exchanges were “secretly insolvent.” When he spoke with

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Bernie Madoff. On December 11, 2008, in the midst of the subprime crisis, Madoff was arrested for running what was at the time the biggest Ponzi scheme in history: $64.8 billion. The market crash of the previous year exposed his fraud, as his clients rushed to withdraw their money only to

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PokerStars, Full Tilt, and Absolute Poker, as well as the funds of customers gambling on them. Full Tilt was accused of running a $300 million Ponzi scheme. PokerStars paid a $547 million fine. In this book I’ve repeatedly mentioned the discovery of a secret “god mode” on the site Ultimate Bet

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only ourselves and each other on whom we can rely. May we choose wisely. EPILOGUE “Investment contracts that are effectively valueless are often described as Ponzi schemes, which are regulated under American law by the Securities and Exchange Commission. In my opinion, the cryptocurrency industry represents the largest

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Ponzi scheme in history.” I hit the red button and glanced up. Thirty feet away, on the dais above me, half a dozen senators stared back. Pat

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and endless patience. Please let me do it again. APPENDIX According to the SEC’s website, there are seven red flags when it comes to Ponzi schemes: • High returns with little or no risk. Every investment carries some degree of risk, and investments yielding higher returns typically involve more risk. Be highly

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tend to go up and down over time. Be skeptical about an investment that regularly generates positive returns regardless of overall market conditions. • Unregistered investments. Ponzi schemes typically involve investments that are not registered with the SEC or with state regulators. Registration is important because it provides investors with access to information

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company’s management, products, services, and finances. • Unlicensed sellers. Federal and state securities laws require investment professionals and firms to be licensed or registered. Most Ponzi schemes involve unlicensed individuals or unregistered firms. • Secretive, complex strategies. Avoid investments if you don’t understand them or can’t get complete information about them

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that funds are not being invested as promised. • Difficulty receiving payments. Be suspicious if you don’t receive a payment or have difficulty cashing out. Ponzi scheme promoters sometimes try to prevent participants from cashing out by offering even higher returns for staying put. NOTES CHAPTER 1: MONEY AND LYING 1 Political

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Road: Benjamin Weiser, “Ross Ulbricht, Creator of Silk Road Website, Is Sentenced to Life in Prison,” New York Times, May 29, 2015. 17 “Naturally occurring Ponzi schemes”: Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 70. 18 Kindleberger: Charles Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, 7th edition

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18, 2002. 34 The fourth red flag for Tether: Tether, “Crystal Clear Fees,” https://tether.to/es/fees. 35 “a fraud can be called a ponzi scheme . . .”: Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World (Scribner, 2018), p. 94. 35 multiple conflicts of interest: Bennett Tomlin

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, Nikolai Musk, Elon Nadkarni, Tushar Nailwal, Sandeep Narrative Economics (Shiller) National Bureau of Economic Research National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team National League Championship Series naturally occurring Ponzi schemes Neuner, Ran New Republic Newsome, Jim New York magazine New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) New York Times Novogratz, Mike Nuevas Ideas O’Leary, Kevin Omnionn

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Money (Cressey) over-the-counter trades (OTC) Paradise Papers Peirce, Hester Peña, Victor Peterson, Mike Pham, Caroline Piancey, Cas Pierce, Brock Piper, Kelsey poker, online Ponzi schemes Powell, Jesse Prager Metis private money Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act proof of reserves proof of stake proof of work Pryor, Mark public key

Investment: A History

by Norton Reamer and Jesse Downing  · 19 Feb 2016

the entire operation was a fraud. Andrew later quoted his father as having said, “It’s all been one big lie. It’s a giant Ponzi scheme and it’s been going on for years, and there have been all these redemptions, and I can’t keep it going anymore. I can

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light on this question are Bernie Madoff’s own contentions that it should have been abundantly obvious to the SEC that he was running a Ponzi scheme. Madoff said, “I was astonished. They never even looked at my stock records.” He also noted that investigators did not check with the Depository Trust

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Company. “If you’re looking at a Ponzi scheme, it’s the first thing you do,” said Madoff.4 If Madoff believed that the commission, charged with overseeing thousands of firms, should have had

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not even require these peer reviews to take place.12 The sad reality is that it seems Friehling had no idea Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. After all, Friehling’s family had money with Madoff. It seems that it was not complicity but incompetence that created a situation where the auditor

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essence of Bernie Madoff’s fraud was that he contended he used a “split-strike conversion” strategy when in fact he was simply running a Ponzi scheme. Split-strike conversion is a trade where one buys an index (or some subset of it), sells call options, and buys put options. Put options

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and then simply buy some of those securities for his own book before executing the trade for the clients—or he was simply running a Ponzi scheme.17 Markopolos wrote a detailed nineteen-page report with a succinct and explicit title: “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud.” This report

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upon the quality and tenacity of the personnel at the SEC. Allen Stanford Bernie Madoff was not the only prominent and wealthy man operating a Ponzi scheme before the financial crisis. Allen Stanford also had a painful fall from grace. The billionaire who once occupied a spot in the Forbes 400 found

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could have seen that Madoff’s returns were too high to be true given their low volatility. 156 Investment: A History Even the very phrase “Ponzi scheme,” used again and again in the headlines to describe the Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford episodes, is eponymously named after Charles Ponzi, who even in

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could not imagine a better choice than a former president whose popularity, at least in the North, was still substantial. While it was not a Ponzi scheme from the very beginning, it did quickly evolve into fraud as Ward tried to recapitalize the firm with new investors who believed the mission and

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for the decision, including that it “remains concerned with the SEC’s track record in dealing with Ponzi schemes.”165 The solution to the commission’s inability to properly identify and prosecute more cases of Ponzi schemes clearly was not to leave it even more bereft of resources than before. The decisions to reduce

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US Securities and Exchange Commission, 1–2. Ibid., 1. Ibid. Securities and Exchange Commission, “Investigation of Failure of the SEC to Uncover Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme—Public Version” (Report No. OIG-509), Office of Investigations, US Securities and Exchange Commission, August 31, 2009, http://www.sec.gov/news /studies/2009/oig

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.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288 04,2104982_2104983_2104992,00.html. “A Century of Ponzi Schemes,” DealBook (blog), New York Times, December 15, 2008, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/a-century-of -ponzi-schemes. Skarda, “William Miller.” Darby, “In Ponzi We Trust.” John Steele Gordon, “Pyramid Schemes Are as American

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, 2012. http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/13/news/economy /federal-reserve-qe3. “A Century of Ponzi Schemes.” DealBook (blog), New York Times, December 15, 2008. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/a-century-of-ponzi -schemes. Chandrasekhar, C. P. “Private Equity: A New Role for Finance?” International Development Economics Associates. Last modified

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. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =1573377. Securities and Exchange Commission. “Investigation of Failure of the SEC to Uncover Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme—Public Version” (Report No. OIG-509). Office of Investigations, US Securities and Exchange Commission, August 31, 2009. http://www.sec.gov/news/studies/2009/oig

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, 125 Plato, 24 430 Investment: A History Plotkin, Eugene, 187–90 Poincaré, Henri, 230 political democratization, 63 Polybius, 51 Ponzi, Charles (Carlo), 152, 156–58 Ponzi schemes, 149, 151–52, 194 Ponzi v. Fessenden, 158 population growth, in Europe, 71 Portugal, 47 power elite, 7–8, 318 Presbyterian Church, 101–2 Prescott

Irrational Exuberance: With a New Preface by the Author

by Robert J. Shiller  · 15 Feb 2000  · 319pp  · 106,772 words

other investment trusts: investment companies without the safeguards we associate with mutual funds today, many of them dishonest operations and some of them even, effectively, Ponzi schemes (see Chapter 3). After the stock market crash of 1929, many of these became even more worthless than the market as a whole, and the

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conspicuous feature of the current high pricing is high confidence that the market will always do well. 64 STR UC TUR AL FAC TOR S Ponzi Schemes as Models of Feedback and Speculative Bubbles It is very hard to prove that a simple mechanical price feedback model, producing heightened investor attention and

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. In order to provide evidence that such feedback mechanisms do play a role in financial markets, it is helpful to look at the example of Ponzi schemes, or pyramid schemes, by means of which hoaxers create positive feedback from putative current investment returns to future investment returns. These schemes have been perpetrated

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!) that demonstrate characteristics of the feedback that cannot be seen so plainly either in normal markets or in the experimental psychologist’s laboratory. In a Ponzi scheme, the manager of the scheme promises to make large profits for investors by investing their money. But little or no investment of contributors’ funds in

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the scheme derives from a particularly famous (though certainly not the first) example, perpetrated by one Charles Ponzi in the United States in 1920. A Ponzi scheme entices initial investors, after they have made a lot of money, to tell their success stories to another round of investors, who then invest even

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law. (Or, possibly, he or she may imagine that with luck, fantastic investment opportunities will be found later, thereby saving the scheme.) We know that Ponzi schemes have been successful in making their perpetrators rich, at least until they were apprehended. Charles Ponzi attracted 30,000 investors in 1920 and issued notes

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totaling $15,000,000, all within seven months.24 In a recent celebrated story, a former housewife, Raejean Bonham, set up an enormous Ponzi scheme on her own in the tiny town of Fox in rural Alaska. She promised to pay 50% returns in two months and enticed 1,200

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1995.25 A particularly dramatic story emerged in Albania in 1996 and 1997 when a number of Ponzi schemes promising fantastic rates of return enticed a good share of the people of that country. Seven Ponzi schemes accumulated some $2 billion, or 30% of Albania’s annual gross domestic product.26 Enthusiasm for the

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schemes was so intense that in the 1996 local elections members of the ruling government party included symbols of the Ponzi scheme funds on their campaign posters, apparently wanting to gain some credit for the new wealth sources. When the schemes failed in 1997, enraged protesters looted

…

were killed. The collapse of the schemes forced the resignation of Prime Minister Aleksander Meksi and his cabinet.27 As part of their strategy, successful Ponzi schemes present to investors a plausible story about how great profits can be made. Charles Ponzi told investors that he was able to make money for

…

activity that also sounded like a plausible source of big money to many investors.)28 A critical observation to be made about these examples of Ponzi schemes is that initial investors were reportedly very skeptical about the schemes and would invest only small amounts. A story about an arbitrage profit opportunity in

…

well before the collapse of these schemes, and the hoaxers must of course deny the claim publicly. This was the case both for the original Ponzi scheme and for the Albanian example. The fact that many people continue to believe in the scheme afterward seems puzzling, and to outside observers the believers

…

others have made a lot of money appears to many people as the most persuasive evidence in support of the investment story associated with the Ponzi scheme—evidence that outweighs even the most carefully reasoned argument against the story. AMP L IF ICATIO N ME CH ANISMS 67 Speculative Bubbles as Naturally

…

Processes It would appear, by extrapolation from examples like those given in the previous section, that speculative feedback loops that are in effect naturally occurring Ponzi schemes do arise from time to time without the contrivance of a fraudulent manager. Even if there is no manipulator fabricating false stories and deliberately deceiving

…

are everywhere. When prices go up a number of times, investors are rewarded sequentially by price movements in these markets, just as they are in Ponzi schemes. There are still many people (indeed, the stock brokerage and mutual fund industries as a whole) who benefit from telling stories that suggest that the

…

these stories to be fraudulent; they need only emphasize the positive news and give less emphasis to the negative. The path of a naturally occurring Ponzi scheme—if we may call speculative bubbles that—will be more irregular and less dramatic, since there is no direct manipulation, but the path may sometimes

…

resemble that of a Ponzi scheme when it is supported by naturally occurring stories. The extension from Ponzi schemes to naturally occurring speculative bubbles appears so natural that one must conclude, if there is to be debate about speculative

…

and efficiently, do not provide arguments as to why feedback loops supporting speculative bubbles cannot occur. In fact, they do not even mention bubbles or Ponzi schemes.30 These books convey a sense of orderly progression in financial markets, of markets that work with mathematical precision. If the phenomena are not mentioned

…

seen recently. We began in Part I with a list of twelve precipitating factors, whose effect is sometimes amplified via feedback loops and naturally occurring Ponzi schemes, aided by the lubricant of the news media as sometime promoter of market exuberance. We saw evidence of strangely high investor confidence and undiminished expectations

…

, “Party On! America’s Portfolio Managers Grow More Bullish on Stocks and Interest Rates,” Barrons, May 3, 1999, pp. 31–38. 24. See Joseph Bulgatz, Ponzi Schemes, Invaders from Mars, and Other Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and the Madness of Crowds (New York: Harmony, 1992), p. 13. 25. Mike Hinman, “World Plus Pleas

…

: Guilty, Guilty,” Anchorage Daily News, July 1, 1998, p. 1F; and Bill Richards, “Highflying Ponzi Scheme Angers and Awes Alaskans,” Wall Street Journal, August 13, 1998, p. B1. 26. John Templeman, “Pyramids Rock Albania,” Business Week, February 10, 1997, p. 59

…

(1995): 583–73. Bruno, Michael, and William Easterly. “Inflation Crises and Long-Run Growth.” Journal of Monetary Economics, 41(1) (1998): 2–26. Bulgatz, Joseph. Ponzi Schemes, Invaders from Mars, and Other Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and the Madness of Crowds. New York: Harmony, 1992. Bullock, Hugh. The Story of Investment Companies. New

…

; investor perceptions of, 62–64; irrational exuberance and, 67–68; media and, 78, 90, 91, 93–95; new era thinking and, 98; overconfidence and, 144; Ponzi schemes as models of, 64–67 Feltus, William, 77 Fidelity Investments, 181 Financial crises, 128–30 Financial News Network, 29 Financial Times (London), 127 Fischer, Stanley

…

the Younger, 246n1 Polaroid Corporation, 178–79 Pollution, 212–13 Ponzi, Charles, 64, 65–66 Ponzi processes, naturally occurring, 44, 67. See also Feedback systems Ponzi schemes, 35, 64–67, 245n30 Porter, Richard, 184 INDEX Portfolio insurance, 92–93, 95 Poterba, James, 78, 80 Pound, John, 154, 166 PPI (Producer Price Index

…

–24; as naturally occurring Ponzi processes, 67; negative, see Negative bubbles; new era thinking and, 98, 118; overconfidence and, 144, 146; policy and, 232–33; Ponzi schemes as models of, 64–67; trade expansion and, 228–30; trade interruptions and, 225–28; word-of-mouth communications and, 157, 162, 228 Stagflation, 116

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