Salon 1

Sometimes, the irony of peoples’ names can be amazing. So, Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years today. Although what he did was unethical and illegal, there is another aspect to this story. Mr. Madoff did not do anything different than most financial institutions in this country. Apparently many people forget the Savings & Loan Crisis where too many people tried to withdraw their money at once, only to discover that the S&Ls did not have enough to cover. Wikipedia describes this cause of the S&L crisis as, “Absence of an ability to vary the return on assets with increases in the rate of interest required to be paid for deposits”.
Hedge funds are also Ponzi schemes. Even our Social Security system is a Ponzi scheme. Employees are paying into it today to cover those collecting today, with no guarantee that the money they are investing will be there for them when it is their time.