Quotes About Ponzi

Washington treats Social Security like a Ponzi scheme.

Many people have made money selling magic potions and Ponzi schemes, but few have gotten rich selling the advice, "Don't buy that stuff.

A typical Ponzi scheme involves taking money from investors, then paying them off with money taken from new investors, rather than paying them from actual earnings.

Social security isn't a ponzi scheme. It's not bankrupting us. It's not an outrage. It is working.

Ponzi schemes don't trickle down, they siphon up.

The whole government is a Ponzi scheme.

Madoff's scam was small compared to Ponzi schemes the government itself runs: Social Security and Medicare.

I trusted the wrong person with finances and the guy ended up breaking my bank. I lost my money in Ponzi schemes. If it wasn't enough to be wasting a lot of it, one of my best friends totally done me dirty and wiped me out.

the way bubbles work is structurally identical to Ponzi schemes—what a coincidence!—and indeed it's another amazing coincidence how much the entire capitalist economy resembles in its basic structure either a Ponzi scheme or a bundle of Ponzi schemes.

Spoofing? No. Ponzi scheme? Not at all! Just finance. Legal as hell.

There are tons of examples of U.K. and European mistakes. A classic one is pensions. That's obviously not an America-specific thing. The British and European economies are suffering under the weight of what is to come. The next great Ponzi scheme after Madoff is probably pensions.

There are legal Ponzi schemes and illegal Ponzi schemes. Social Security is a legal Ponzi scheme, as is the stock market.

They had encountered fraud cases, even Ponzi schemes, before. But they had never faced anything on this scale. The tally of customer losses was staggering, and the victims were spread around the globe.

Largely incomprehensible: Madoff's staff of high school–educated clerks facilitated the Ponzi scheme for 40 years without a single one ever realizing it was a Ponzi scheme.

My favorite pre-Ponzi schemer was known as '520 Percent Miller' because he promised 10 percent returns a week, or 520 percent a year. Of course he was just using new investors' money to pay old investors, and soon he was on the lam.

In a Ponzi scheme, a promoter pays back his initial investors with money he has raised from new investors. Eventually, the promoter can no longer find enough new investors to pay off the people who have already put up money, and the scheme collapses.

When running a Ponzi scheme, how does one avoid enormous, unexpected withdrawals - runs on the bank, so to speak - that would pull back the curtain and reveal a little man blowing smoke? One way would be to attract a core of investors who could be counted on to never withdraw more than a small percentage of principal each year.

Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.

By the time we enter this work world and we're breadwinners, we enter a world that's just cluttered with spam, fake, digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers - a deception epidemic.

Indeed, what was remarkable about this scheme wasn't Ponzi. It was his victims. If people really would believe that a 34-year-old ex-bank clerk who had just served three years in prison for check kiting was capable of doubling their money in six months by exchanging millions of 10 cent postal coupons from Europe – well, if they would believe that, then they would believe anything.

The combination of Ponzi's huge personality and the enormous if brief success of his scheme, combined with the tremendous publicity which surrounded it, is ultimately what attached his name to it.

Like a giant Ponzi scheme, profits depended on an unending source of associates entering at the bottom of the pyramid, funneling cash up the chain, and departing before making partner.

Ponzi had been in Brazil, and then Argentina, where he bought a boardinghouse populated by prostitutes, along with a hot dog stand. He had hoped it would be the start of a national chain.

Many North American cities are just waking up to the fact that they have been engaging in a massive urban Ponzi scheme, with new development creating short-term benefits in development fees and tax revenues but even bigger long-term costs that pile up faster than cities' ability to pay them off.