Word: ponzis
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...that my wife's entire family had been in the fund for decades and lived well on the returns, which ranged from 15% to 22%. It was all very secretive and tough to get into, which, looking back, was a brilliant strategy to lure suckers. Unlike the usual Ponzi mechanics, the fund even stopped investments into accounts a few years back, at least in our network. There were the usual warnings prior to investing - we all knew it was a risk, we were told to make sure we were diversified, blah-blah - but, my God, it had been going strong...
...course the call did come, as it always does with such things. It was not an ordinary Ponzi scheme we were all part of; it was the biggest in the history of the world, valued at some $50 billion. Lucky us. Small investors, institutions, hedge funds, global banks, pension funds - all fell victim to usual suspects: a smooth huckster and greed...
...billion Ponzi scheme allegedly masterminded by former Nasdaq chairman Bernard Madoff punctuated a miserable year for Wall Street in the worst possible way: by underlining, yet again, that savvy market-makers can harness arcane financial instruments as weapons of mass destruction. Left in Madoff's wake are bankrupt investors, mortified regulators and a raft of unnoticed red flags. Madoff's methods previously had been investigated by the SEC, and in 2001, a prescient article raised questions about his inscrutable strategies: "Madoff's investors rave about his performance - even though they don't understand how he does it," wrote Barron...
Though a Boston businessman named Charles Ponzi was the scam's namesake, he wasn't its original practitioner. According to Mitchell Zuckoff, a Ponzi biographer, the reigning king of the "rob Peter to pay Paul" scam was a New York grifter named William Miller, who bilked investors out of $1 million - nearly $25 million in today's dollars - in 1899. After drumming up interest by claiming to have an inside window into the way profitable companies operated, Miller - who earned the nickname "520 percent" due to the astonishing rate of return he promised investors over the course of a year...
...money back. In the first week of December, according to the SEC suit, Madoff told a senior executive that there had been requests from clients for $7 billion in redemptions. On Wednesday, Madoff met with his two sons to tell them the advisory business was a fraud - "a giant Ponzi scheme," he reportedly told them - and was nearly bankrupt. The sons reportedly contacted their lawyer, who then alerted federal authorities to the fraud. Before being caught, Madoff was working on a scheme to dole out his funds' remaining $300 million to the firm's employees and his family members...