Friday, January 30, 2009

All Ponzi all the time

This guy’s name has been used over and over lately. That’s because there have been quite a few cases of this type of nefarious activity in the news recently. In fact, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that at least six suspected multimillion-dollar fraud cases have emerged this month alone, many of them alleged Ponzi schemes, in which investors are lured by promises of lofty returns but are actually paid off from new victims' funds. Obviously Madoff's alleged swindle is the worst of all, (after all, what’s 50 billion dollars among friends in the grand scheme of things) but they are all pretty heinous. Something has got to give soon.

These guys will probably all wind up at some country club, sipping cappuccinos with ankle bracelets on. Please, at least let them be cappuccinos from this machine. My wife has one and the darn thing hasn’t worked properly in all the years she has owned it.

Oh, and the original guy, his scheme was based on arbitraging international reply coupons for postage stamps in the 1920’s. Potential investors were lured in by the promise of consistent and incredibly high returns that seemed too good to be true. They were, so I guess the more things change the more they stay the same.

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