Word: scheme
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...other person suddenly not taking risks is Obama. He hired old, experienced staffers--one of whom is so old, he was, impossibly, the Fed chairman before Alan Greenspan. It is possible that he's vetting people from Lincoln's Cabinet. Obama's economic scheme isn't to buy up vast amounts of mortgage-backed securities but to fix old roads and bridges. This is a guy who not only understood how to roll the dice in 2008 but might also have a good idea what we're going to be like for the next few years. We're probably...
...person could buy 66 International Reply Coupons in Rome for the equivalent of $1. Those same 66 coupons would cost $3.30 in Boston," where Ponzi was based. But there weren't enough coupons in circulation to make the plan workable. The ploy bore the hallmarks of both Miller's scheme and others to follow it: it trumpeted the possibility of massive gains (Ponzi promised a 50% return in just 90 days), parried questions about its legitimacy by paying out the first few investors, and collapsed when Ponzi couldn't rustle up enough fresh marks to keep up with the money...
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...
...Earlier this month, Minnesota businessman Tom Petters was indicted by a federal grand jury on 20 counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering stemming from his alleged role in a 13-year, $3.5 billion Ponzi ring. Still, the $50 billion fraud Madoff allegedly perpetrated is the most egregious Ponzi scheme to date-unless you subscribe to an argument advanced by financial consultant Janet Tavakoli. In a neat summary of the anger millions of people are channeling toward Wall Street, Tavakoli wrote on her company website: "The largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the capital markets is the relationship between...
...unrest in 2006 centered on a new youth labor contract that detractors claimed handed an unfair advantage to employers. The government ultimately capitulated on the scheme, one of more than two dozen such victories French students have claimed since 2000. But while the majority of those victories came after peaceful demonstrations, France has a history of protest turning violent?student and otherwise. Some observers say the situation today is particularly volatile and unpredictable. "As in Greece and many European countries, the unions, opposition parties, and associations that usually take youth movements under their wing and organize protests in France...