Bernie Madoff's Pyramid Collapses (2008)
This Day
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Ponzi Scheme 101
Made off is a decades-long Ponzi scheme. He had investors give him money and if those investors wanted to withdraw any of their fantastical returns, he would just withdraw it from the same bank account. Everybody was like, oh my gosh, this is a fantastic plan in which people just kept getting more and more profits. But that's not how investing works. There are always busts and booms. And I think part of why he was able to fleece people in this way was because we had convinced ourselves that astronomical returns are now the norm.
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