Curiouser and Curiouser

In a Ponzidom far far away, there lived a King who amassed a great fortune, to the tune of 64 billion, by defrauding his loyal subjects. Then the great civil war started and the king was dethroned and thrown into jail and the accountants took control of the land and started to calculate the King’s fortune to divide it back to the people. Only they made a fatal mistake in calculating the fraud based on a newfound accounting theory which showed the loses to be 21 billion. Soon the people revolted again, but this time they took the heads of the chief accountant, who was soon charged of operating a reverse Ponzi. And they lived happily ever after. OK boys, it’s late now, go to sleep.

“The sum of all of those individual account balances was more than $64 billion. By contrast, Mr. Picard has said that the eligible losses in the fraud, by his formula, total just over $21 billion”

Achieving Closure

Now this bit of news is going around, possibly as some form a psychological boost to the victims of the great ponzinator, cause unless the premium over the asking price is to the tune of 64,991 billion they sure as hell are not getting a cheque in the mail….

How to run a successful ponzi

By now a lot of you my dear readers are looking at the world developments and thinking that you could run a good ponzi scheme if only for that little bitty rule that says that all money going back 6 years should be returned. All.

Well we may have found a loophole!!! Crowds of prospective ponziers are waiting the court decision to see if the wife of R.A.Stanford can unfreeze her half of the fortune, which was awarded in their divorce settlement. So you all know the drill.

Marry someone, divorce them, give them half of your ponzimongous loot, repeat every 6 years, end when caught by SEC.

Recovery efforts

We have been covering as of lately the attempts to recover funds from the Madoff ponzivaganza (see 1, 2) that crash landed 6 months ago, yet it seems that they were not as successful as hoped. Not so much.

Today though, a new era dawns, one that we realize that the money is out there. * Two points of interest, again for those of you not actually hitting those links,

1. recovered 25.5 m out of what was once worth 1 b **

2. liquidator recovered 1b so far, 3/4 of which is from returned redemptions ***

* Just not as much as we hoped for and by far not as much as was swindled

** probably the correct wording should be , what was once thought to be worth…

*** actually not recovered yet, but you better send it back or else…

A Madoff and Two Stanfords

Now hold on a minute. OK i understand that today was a news day, and that people were glue to the TVs watching the guilty plea and more importantly what he wore, what car he drove, if he was wearing his rings and some were even disappointed we didn’t have a white Bronco style chase. But i never flipped the switch on my TV, never. I‘ve followed this from the beginning. How did i miss that this thing just got from 50b to 65b?

What is a Ponzi scheme?

Many examples recently, exactly like this one, but in light of the new wave of fund redemptions strategies being adopted globally, one has to ask what’s the difference between a fund and a ponzi?