Amy Goodman Quotes

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.

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.

No Ponzi schemer tells anyone exactly how it works. The purpose of a Ponzi scheme is to trick people, to take the money and run.

As I've said before, free money scams are a problem.

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.

Now, a lot of people didn't know him at all - it went through feeder funds, so they wouldn't even have known anything about Bernie Madoff. But everybody finds a justification for their behavior, and obviously, Bernie had a half dozen justifications in his own mind.

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.

My retirement plan was in place but Bernie Maidoff with my money.

Yeah, we shot ourselves in the foot right out of the gate. The guy who ran it at first misled pretty much everybody about how much capital we had. He said we had enough to go three years without making money, and we had enough to go three weeks.

My family survived losing money to Bernie Madoff incredibly well compared to others.

When so much money is involved in these movies, someone somewhere is going to try to screw you.

Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I'm giving him credit for, but I just couldn't get under his skin.

For those of you who believe in the Social Security Trust Fund, you can’t trust it; there is no fund, and no one is secure …. A Ponzi scheme.

This was a massive Ponzi scheme and the biggest crime against the American economy in our lifetimes—in fact, ever…. You had various traders buying each other’s products to artificially keep the prices up so that the bubble didn’t collapse.

Bernie Madoff... was regulated up and down and every which way, and it didn't do any good - he ran away with everyone's money.

Hubspot's leaders were not heroes but rather a pack of sales and marketing charlatans who spun a good story about magical transformation technology and got rich by selling shares in a company that still has never turned a profit.

It has now become a status symbol among the rich to say that you got ripped off by Bernie Madoff, because everybody is losing money in the market, everybody is, but it makes you special and unique if you lost money because of Madoff. These people don't think it makes 'em look stupid. It continues to elevate their status, they think.

The basic scam in the Internet age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out fiftieth-story windows, and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

My grandparents went through a bad experience themselves; they invested money in a church and got burned - the pastor had his own agenda - and my grandfather lost interest in the church after that. That was when I had the option to not go. 'Grandpa ain't going; I'm gonna stay with Grandpa.'

From 1983 to 2000, William Goren stole more than $30 million from investors on Long Island and in Queens. His favorite targets were widows and retired couples, like Helga and Simon Novack, Holocaust survivors who gave Mr. Goren their life savings.

Herbalife: the customers are fictitious, the business opportunity is a scam, the university degree is a fraud.

There is no quick way of making money. People come to you with tips for the races or offer the latest Ponzi scheme, but I can see them coming a mile off. I just go with the adage that if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.

To the extent that people overpay as a result of the Libor manipulation, they should be able to get their money back. Individuals who have mortgages, pension funds who had pensioner investments - whoever was ripped off is entitled to get their money back.

Don't under any circumstances invest any money on the Black Star Line. The District Attorney of New York County has pronounced its methods fraudulent.

There is no real difference between a set of bank directors, who make and issue notes … which they deliberately promise to pay with a previous resolution not to pay, and a gang of fair, open, honest, counterfeiters.