Word: pyramidally
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Georges Pompidou had his controversial cultural center. Jacques Chirac got his showcase of indigenous art. And in between François Mitterrand left his imprint on Paris with a veritable building binge that included the Louvre pyramid, Bastille Opera, and Arch at la Défense. Given the grand construction legacies of his predecessors, is there anything unusual about current French President Nicolas Sarkozy's effort to create a new museum dedicated to French history...
Emily Medina isn't running a pyramid scheme, despite what people often think. As the petite 26-year-old works her way through some of New York City's poorer neighborhoods, she approaches women selling food and trinkets on the street and offers to lend them money to grow their businesses. The organization Medina works for, Grameen, is one of the world's largest microfinance outfits and has a Nobel Prize to its name for this work. But in New York neighborhoods where loans to street vendors tend to come with interest rates north of 40%, it can take...
...church netted $500 million in a 1990s fraud that promised God would double the money of pious investors. Boy-band impresario Lou Pearlman, in addition to foisting 'N Sync on an unsuspecting public, stole $300 million from clients over two decades. And citizens poured some $1.2 billion into Albanian pyramid schemes after the fall of communism; when the schemes collapsed in 1997, investor outrage toppled the government. Still, Madoff's $50 billion scam would be the biggest ever--except to those who say the risky trading in mortgage-backed securities was a Ponzi scheme of its own. The price...
...Ponzi scheme impossible to sustain also means that, at first, it makes you very rich, very fast. "The financial payoff is so much larger," says Minnesota-based forensic psychologist Steven Norton. "The money comes in, the power comes in and that pushes them." What's more, says Galieti, the pyramid structure of a Ponzi scam means that there can be only one person at the pinnacle - an appealing idea for a narcissist who would just as soon not work invisible frauds inside a big investment bank...
Ponzi, who was released from prison and deported back to Italy in 1934, set the standard in the genre. But the golden age of Ponzi and pyramid schemes didn't arrive for decades. (The two highly similar cons are often conflated, though in Ponzi schemes, a ringleader facilitates the entire enterprise; in a pyramid scheme, rungs of collaborators recruit new investors.) In the boom years of the 1980s and '90s, as traders developed increasingly sophisticated investment vehicles, the cons cropped up with increasing regularity. In 1985, a San Diego currency trader named David Dominelli was revealed to have fleeced more...