Willi , Exile etc .. Pyramids, Susu to Ponzi etc

[Sir X]

Were the fall of third world pyramids, susu signs of a recession , from Olint to the Colombian racket to wall street to the Ponzi scheme on wall street , lord knows how many schemes we havent heard of in Africa & Asia before the declared recession.

Funny thing is , Asia declared a recession before Europe,the Americas declared it last .

To the financial wizards or just plain wizards is thier any merit to my musings, wili , exile etc ?

[Sir X]

Migrant workers under pressure



In China, competition for increasingly scarce jobs is growing fiercer


By Stephanie Holmes
BBC News



Vast sums of money criss-cross the globe each day, as millions of migrant workers send a portion of their pay packet home.
This surging flow of funds supports one in 10 people on the planet, but the world financial crisis could slam on the brakes.
In some cases it's the workers that are now making the journey home, rather than the money they've earned, month after month, in a foreign country.
"I was in Doha, talking to a guy from Djibouti and he says he makes about $500 to $600 a month and sends about $300 to his family," says economist Dilip Ratha, the head of the World Bank team which studies these money flows, known as remittances.
"Basically, every penny he doesn't spend goes home. And I've heard the same story from Pakistani undocumented migrants in Madrid, from Bangladeshis in Austria, El Salvadorians in Washington - they basically move to send money home." See how remittances compare in value to aid

The World Bank estimates the value of these often invisible cash flows at anywhere between $350bn and $600bn (£236bn - £405bn) per year.
Exact numbers are very difficult to estimate as they are based both on traceable channels - like banks - and cash carried across borders by hand or via informal brokers.
A resilient resource
But the same is estimated at up to three times the amount of money transferred from richer countries to the developing world by governments and international institutions as aid.
The flow of remittances has been rising by as much as 30% year on year in some areas, but the rate of growth has already dramatically slowed.
In 2009, the World Bank predicts, the amount sent home by the world's 150 million international migrants could fall by about 1%.
Mexico - the third biggest recipient of remittances in the world - is forecasting that income will dip in 2008 by almost 8% from the estimated $23.8bn in 2007.


"We are very worried that remittances will not grow in the coming years because of the financial crisis in the developed countries which are the main source of remittances," says Mr Ratha.

Migrant workers - working hard to alleviate need at home - often represent a resilient income source for developing countries.
In 2007, they generated almost half of Tajikistan's Gross Domestic Product and more than a third of Lesotho's, according to the World Bank.
And in the past when times are tough in the receiving country more money, rather than less, has arrived back home.
Spending less
But this new financial crisis is unparalleled in its global scale, warns Pedro de Vasconcelos, an expert on remittances for the International Fund for Agricultural Development, hitting rich and poor countries alike.
Most migrants send small amounts - often $100 - back home each month

"Many migrants have two or sometimes three jobs," he said.
"They might lose one. Imagine they have an income of $1,500 and they send 20 - 50% of the money home and live with the rest. When they absorb the shock they just try to live with less so they can maintain the flow of remittances. But they still have to live."
Many migrant workers in the US are employed in the service industry and when richer Americans decide to cut back on their Friday night meal out, or decide that they can't really afford to pay the nanny anymore, he warns, the impact will be direct.
"In the US, there is this electric feeling in the air - nobody knows how it is going to affect their lives. Everyone is frozen, spending less. If the crisis starts settling and being more obvious, it will affect the Latin American communities in the US."

Countries encourage people to emigrate as workers in order to reduce unemployment and political pressure




Stephen Castles
University of Oxford

The darker side of remittances
Sending money home: In graphics




But while remittances are predicted to dip, other sources of income received by developing countries from outside could decline far more steeply.
Experts predict that aid and foreign investment in developing countries, currently standing at $1 trillion per year, could be halved as a result of the financial crisis.
Remittances could therefore become even more important to a nation trying to make ends meet, but there is a debate about how effective they are at promoting development.
Migration culture
Some believe that channelling money directly into the pockets of family members is the most direct form of development available - ensuring the money reaches those who need it most.
But others see remittances as both socially disruptive and even politically dangerous.
Many migrant workers often work long hours for little pay

"They don't automatically lead to development," argues Stephen Castles, Professor of Migration and Refugee Studies at the University of Oxford.
"There are cases where countries encourage people to emigrate as workers in order to reduce unemployment and political pressure - getting them to move out reduces political discontent," he says, citing the Philippines as an example where a culture of migration has become the norm.
"There are actually colleges in the Philippines where qualified doctors are retraining as nurses because it is easier for them to find work as nurses in the West, so you actually get people being de-qualified in order to migrate," he says.
And because remittances are by their very nature private and often untraceable transfers of money they can end up sustaining fighting, rather than promoting prosperity.
"If you think about Somalia, the only way to send money is through irregular and informal channels. That's the danger, because it isn't controlled, it could fuel further conflicts."
But Mr Ratha is a fervent believer in the transforming power of migrants - and the money they send home - to help move a country out of poverty.
"Remittances can provide food, or clothing, or housing or educational expenses or capital for small businesses for the family," he says. "In the end, people are what we want development for."

[Sir X]

Funny thing is the man was once the prezi or chief of Nasdaq and a run Pyramid.

[Sir X]

The Enduring Appeal of Ponzi Schemes

POSTED: 12:39 PM ET, 12/15/2008 by Derek Kravitz
TAGS: Wall Street, finance, fraud, ponzi scheme



Bernard Madoff (By Ruby Washington / AP)
Regulators are already calling the $50 billion Ponzi scheme allegedly perpetrated by storied Wall Street giant Bernard L. Madoff the largest in history. Madoff's high-profile clients apparently suffered staggering losses.
Among Madoff's duped clientele: real estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman, the foundation of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, a charity of movie director Steven Spielberg and the charitable foundation of Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), plus a host of prominent Jewish charities.
At its core, a Ponzi scheme is a simple scam: The first investors get paid, but the initial high returns are financed not by profits from real economic activity but by money flowing in from subsequent investors. The term "Ponzi scheme" is named after Charles Ponzi, a Boston scammer who briefly became a millionaire in 1920 with a fraud involving the Italian lira.
Here's a breakdown of other notable Ponzi schemes uncovered in recent years:
Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu was charged in October for allegedly running a $60 million Ponzi scheme.
Securities regulators say Hsu and his company, Next Components, raised money from investors by promising 14 to 24 percent returns every 70 to 130 days for using the money to make short-term loans to businesses.
In reality, prosecutors say, Hsu used the money to support his luxurious lifestlye, make political donations and pay early returns to investors. (Hsu is also awaiting trial on criminal charges related to the case and that he made illegal campaign contributions to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and others.)
Lou Pearlman, the former boy-band promoter who created the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync, allegedly stole at least $300 million from investors in a decades-long Ponzi scheme. He is serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Samuel Israel III, a co-founder of the Connecticut hedge-fund firm Bayou Group, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in April after a $400 million Ponzi scheme was uncovered following the hedge fund's collapse in May 2006. Investors sued Israel, claiming he was paying old investors with money from new ones.
Lance K. Poulsen, who founded National Century Financial Enterprises, was convicted in November on conspiracy and securities fraud charges in connection with more than $3 billion in questionable debt his company issued before it folded in 2002.
The case, which authorities likened to a massive Ponzi scheme, amounted to one of the largest investigations of a private company, securities regulators said at the time.
Two Baptist Foundation of Arizona executives were accused of fraudulently conducting a mammoth real estate Ponzi scheme while claiming to do God's work. William P. Crotts, the former president of the foundation and Thomas D. Grabinski, the former chief counsel of the foundation, were sentenced to eight and six years in prison, respectively. Each was ordered to pay $159 million in restitution after being convicted of one count of fraud and one count of conducting an illegal enterprise.
When the foundation collapsed in 1999, 11,000 victims collectively lost $585 million.
Martin Armstrong, a former director of Princeton Economics International, a money-management firm, was charged with cheating Japanese investors in a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. More than $3 billion worth of notes were sold, prosecutors alleged.
Kenneth P. Kasarjian, a former executive of the Bennett Funding Group Inc., which regulators described more than a year ago as a "massive, ongoing Ponzi scheme" that cost investors $1.5 billion, pleaded guilty to criminal securities fraud, bankruptcy fraud, perjury and obstructing justice. He admitting that he was responsible for selling $850 million worth of the contracts on leases -- many of which didn't really exist.
Steven Hoffenberg, who built a debt-collection agency into a New York financial empire and unsuccessfully attempted to buy the New York Post last year, was charged with fraudulently selling almost 3,000 investors $450 million in securities over a six-year period.
And New York car dealer John McNamara of Port Jefferson, N.Y., allegedly was routinely allowed to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars from General Motors Corp. from 1980 to 1991 for the purchase of 70,000 vehicles, mostly vans, which didn't exist. The tab: $436 million.

By Derek Kravitz | December 15, 2008; 12:39 PM ET
Previous: Emanuel Talked To Blago Aides, Giant Ponzi Scheme, Lobbying Test for Obama | Next: Report: Interior Office Meddled With Endangered Species Act
Comments

Please email us to report offensive comments.




You could add Social Security to the list...

Posted by: Broked | December 15, 2008 2:27 PM
Some members of the North Phoenix Baptist Church say that the Baptist Foundation of Arizona Ponzi scheme started there. I've read that members say John McCain supported it and that both the pastor and McCain apparently told members that it was a good deal.
Church members really need to be suspicious of people looking for investors for good deals in church. In fact, any kind of business dealings brought up in church should send up a bright red flag.
Let's hope our legislators are wiser than they use to be.

Posted by: Judi1 | December 15, 2008 2:39 PM
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Ponzi Schemes

By Alex Altman Monday, Dec. 15, 2008


(l. to r.) Charles Ponzi and Bernard Madoff.
(l. to r.) Bettmann / Corbis ; Ruby Washington / The New York Times

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The $50 billion Ponzi scheme allegedly masterminded by former Nasdaq chairman Bernard Madoff punctuated a miserable year for Wall Street in the worst possible way: by underlining, yet again, that savvy market-makers can harness arcane financial instruments as weapons of mass destruction. Left in Madoff's wake are bankrupt investors, mortified regulators and a raft of unnoticed red flags. Madoff's methods previously had been investigated by the SEC, and in 2001, a prescient article raised questions about his inscrutable strategies: "Madoff's investors rave about his performance—even though they don't understand how he does it," wrote Barron's Erin Arvedlund, who quoted a "very satisfied investor" as conceding, "Even knowledgeable people can't really tell you what he's doing." But for investors pocketing windfalls, the lure of easy money outstripped suspicions raised by Madoff's shroud of secrecy. When that shroud was lifted, however, Madoff's investment fund stood revealed as a classic Ponzi scheme: a con game in which the illusion of solvency was created by paying off early investors with capital raised from later entrants. As long as new investment continued to come in the door, the earlier adopters reaped fat rewards; once markets tumbled and investors withdrew, however, the whole thing collapsed like a house of cards.
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Though a Boston businessman named Charles Ponzi was the scam's namesake, he wasn't its original practitioner. According to Mitchell Zuckoff, a Ponzi biographer, the reigning king of the "rob Peter to pay Paul" scam was a New York grifter named William Miller, who bilked investors out of $1 million — nearly $25 million in today's dollars — in 1899. After drumming up interest by claiming to have an inside window into the way profitable companies operated, Miller — who earned the nickname "520 percent" due to the astonishing rate of return he promised investors over the course of a year — salted his scam by paying out the first few investors. After his racket was exposed by a newspaper investigation, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. According to Zuckoff, his creditors got just 28 cents back for every dollar they'd invested.
Ponzi was a charismatic Italian immigrant who, in 1919 and 1920, coaxed thousands of people into shelling out millions of dollars — including a staggering $1 million in a single three-hour period — to buy postage stamps using international reply coupons. This strategy, Ponzi promised, enabled one to purchase postage at European currencies' lower fixed rates before redeeming them in U.S dollars at higher values. "For instance," Zuckoff explained in a Dec. 15 article for FORTUNE, "a person could buy 66 International Reply Coupons in Rome for the equivalent of $1. Those same 66 coupons would cost $3.30 in Boston," where Ponzi was based. But there weren't enough coupons in circulation to make the plan workable. The ploy bore the hallmarks of both Miller's scheme and others to follow it: it trumpeted the possibility of massive gains (Ponzi promised a 50% return in just 90 days), parried questions about its legitimacy by paying out the first few investors, and collapsed when Ponzi couldn't rustle up enough fresh marks to keep up with the money going out the door.
Ponzi, who was released from prison and deported back to Italy in 1934, set the standard in the genre. But the golden age of Ponzi and pyramid schemes didn't arrive for decades. (The two highly similar cons are often conflated, though in Ponzi schemes, a ringleader facilitates the entire enterprise; in a pyramid scheme, rungs of collaborators recruit new investors.) In the boom years of the 1980s and '90s, as traders developed increasingly sophisticated investment vehicles, the cons cropped up with increasing regularity. In 1985, a San Diego currency trader named David Dominelli was revealed to have fleeced more than 1,000 investors to the tune of $80 million. During the 1990s, a Florida church called Greater Ministries International bilked nearly 20,000 people out of $500 million in a pyramid scheme hatched by leader Gerald Payne, who claimed God would double the money of pious investors. (Dominelli pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in prison, while Payne was convicted and sentenced to 27.) The spate of incidents wasn't limited to the U.S., either. When Communism crumbled in Eastern Europe, one of the earliest side-effects of free market capitalism was the proliferation of people looking to get rich quick. In Albania, under Communism the poorest nation in Europe, citizens sank some $1.2 billion dollars into pyramid schemes in 1996. When they collapsed the following year, investor outrage brought down the government.
This ignominious group has had some high-profile recent entrants, including Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu, who was charged in October with operating a $60 million Ponzi fraud, and former boy-band impresario Lou Pearlman, who in addition to foisting N'Sync on an unsuspecting public also stole $300 million in investor capital over two decades. Earlier this month, Minnesota businessman Tom Petters was indicted by a federal grand jury on 20 counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering stemming from his alleged role in a 13-year, $3.5 billion Ponzi ring. Still, the $50 billion fraud Madoff allegedly perpetrated is the most egregious Ponzi scheme to date—unless you subscribe to an argument advanced by financial consultant Janet Tavakoli. In a neat summary of the anger millions of people are channeling toward Wall Street, Tavakoli wrote on her company website: "The largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the capital markets is the relationship between failed mortgage lenders and investment banks that securitized the risky overpriced loans and sold these packages to other investors—a Ponzi scheme by every definition applied to Madoff." By comparison, she wrote, the fallen fund manager is just "a piker."

[Exile]

Not a financial wizard by any means BUT this whole fall seemed to have been predicated on plain greed and deceit. Heard about the Ponzi scheme in Palm Beach? All the stars and rich peple wanted more....and there is always a medicine man somewhere to sell something...
Palm Beach County man's alleged Ponzi scheme ripples worldwide

By Sun-Sentinel and wire reports
Monday, December 15, 2008

They had known him for years as a golf partner, a family friend. Some were neighbors or fellow members of Palm Beach Country Club and other elite social cliques in South Florida.
Many had begun investing with 70-year-old Bernard L. Madoff decades ago, often after being referred by a friend or relative who had known the Wall Street veteran even longer.
Those investors were scrambling Friday to learn whether they had been wiped out by what prosecutors described as a multibillion dollar Ponzi scheme.
The list of investors who say they were duped is growing, snaring some of the world's biggest banking institutions and hedge funds, the super rich and the famous, pensioners and charities.
The alleged victims who sunk cash into veteran Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff's investment pool include real estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman, the foundation of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, and a charity of movie director Steven Spielberg, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Among the world's biggest banking institutions, Britain's HSBC Holdings PLC, Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC and Man Group PLC, Spain's Grupo Santander SA, France's BNP Paribas and Japan's Nomura Holdings all reported that they had fallen victim to Madoff's alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme.
The 70-year-old Madoff, well respected in the investment community after serving as chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, was arrested Thursday in what prosecutors say was a $50 billion scheme to defraud investors. Some investors claim they've been wiped out, while others are still likely to come forward.
"There were a lot of very sophisticated people who were duped, and that happens a great deal when you've had somebody decide to be unscrupulous," said Harvey Pitt, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulator in charge of monitoring investment funds like the one Madoff operated.
The extent of the potential damage prompted a leading fund manager in London to lash out at U.S. regulators for failing to detect the fraud earlier.
"I think now it is very difficult for people to invest in things that are meant to be regulated in America, because they haven fallen down in the job," Nicola Horlick, the manager of Bramdean Alternatives, which has 9 percent of its funds invested in Madoff's scheme, told the British Broadcasting Corp.
"All through the credit crunch this has been apparent," Horlick added. "This is the biggest financial scandal, probably, in the history of the markets." Among U.S. investors, the Boston-based Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, a charity that financed trips for Jewish youth to Israel, sacked its staff after revealing that the money for its operations was invested with Madoff.
New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg, one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, entrusted his family's charitable foundation to Madoff.
Lautenberg's attorney, Michael Griffinger, said they weren't yet sure the extent of the foundation's losses, but that the bulk of its investments had been handled by Madoff.
Lautenberg's foundation handed out more than $765,000 to at least 100 recipients in 2006, according to the most recent listing on Guidestar, which tracks charitable organization filings.
The foundation helps support a variety of religious, educational, civic and arts organizations in New Jersey and elsewhere, and its contributions range from a gift of than $300,000 to the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey to a $2,000 donation to a children's program at the Hackensack Medical Center.
Reports from Florida to Minnesota included profiles of ordinary investors who gave Madoff their money. Some had been friends with him for decades, others were able to invest because they were a friend of a friend. They told stories of losing everything from $40,000 to an entire nest egg worth well over $1 million.
They join a list of more powerful investors that have come forward, all worried about the extent of their losses. The roster of names include former Philadelphia Eagles owner Norman Braman, New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon and J. Ezra Merkin, the chairman of GMAC Financial Services, among others.
Among those overseas confirming exposure on Monday, Banco Santander, the largest bank in the euro zone by market capitalization, said its clients have 2.33 billion euros ($3.07 billion) in exposure with Madoff, mostly through a fund called Optimal Strategic US Equity.
HSBC, Britain's largest bank, said a "small number" of its insitutional clients had exposure totaling some US$1 billion in Madoff funds.
It added that it has custody clients who have invested with Madoff, but it did not believe those "custodial arrangements should be a source of exposure to the group."
Royal Bank of Scotland — Britain's second-largest bank, which is now 58 percent owned by the British government - said it could lose around 400 million euros pounds ($600 million) through exposure in trading and collateralized lending to funds of hedge funds invested with Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities LLC.
Man Group, the world's largest publicly traded fund manager that reported exposure of around $360 million on Monday, said "it appears that a systematic and comprehensive fraud may have been committed, evading a range of structural controls."
Nomura Holdings said it has 27.5 billion yen ($306 million) in exposure, but added that any losses were likely to be limited compared to its capital base.
On Friday, representatives from major U.S. banks — Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., PNC Financial Services Group Inc. and Merrill Lynch & Co. — declined to comment on if they had exposure to Madoff's company. Both BlackRock Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said they had no exposure.
Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo & Co., Comerica Inc. and U.S. Bancorp did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

[Exile]

Palm Beachers call Bernie Madoff arrest 'knife in the heart'

Click-2-Listen

By SHANNON DONNELLY
Daily News Society Editor

Monday, December 15, 2008

Photo by Lucien Capehart Photography(enlarge photo)Bernie Madoff, front, right, attended Carl Shapiro's 95th birthday celebration in February with clockwise, Ronnie Shapiro Zinner, Dr. Mike Zinner, Ruth Shapiro (head turned) and Ellen Shapiro Jaffe and Bob Jaffe (partially obscured). To Madoff's right are Dan and Linda Shapiro Waintrup.

Bernie Madoff was the son Carl Shapiro never had.
When they first met 48 years ago, "he was 22 years old, a smart young guy," Shapiro said Monday. "A friend asked me to meet him, maybe throw him a little business. I had plenty of irons in the fire, so I declined. But my friend insisted."
At the time, Shapiro, now 95, was doing a lot of arbitrage.
"In those days, it took three weeks to complete a sale," Shapiro said. "This kid stood in front of me and said 'I can do it in three days.' And he did."
Shapiro gave him a check for $100,000, "and he did very well with it. That was the beginning."
The end came Thursday.
Shapiro got a call from his son-in-law
"Turn on CNN," was all he said.
There was Madoff — the man who sat at the family table at Shapiro's 95th birthday party, who played with Shapiro's great-grandchildren, who traveled with him, who was on the short list of invitees to every family birthday, anniversary, bat mitzvah, wedding or graduation — being led from his New York office in handcuffs.
The revelation that Madoff had admitted to running what federal officials called "the world's largest Ponzi scheme" was, Shapiro said, "a knife in the heart."
There was no clue anything was wrong. As recently as last month, the textiles magnate sent Madoff more millions to invest.
"He seemed a little anxious this time," Ruth, 91, Shapiro's wife of 69 years, said of Madoff. "He kept calling saying 'I didn't get it; it hasn't come yet, are you sure you sent it?'
"I'll never believe this, what he did to people," Ruth Shapiro said. "Some are completely wiped out. They have nothing left. Nothing."
Before his financial house of cards collapsed in a heap — taking with it more than a half-billion dollars of Shapiro's personal and foundation funds, and untold billions from private and institutional investors — Madoff lived a relatively low-profile, albeit comfortable life.
He was oddly discerning about whom he would accept as a client. Billionaires were sometimes turned away, while smaller investors with "only" a few million were welcomed.
"Bernie would not solicit for business," said Bob Jaffe, Shapiro's son-in-law, whose sister, children and parents had invested with Madoff. "People went to him."
Or, sometimes, they went to Jaffe, who was often approached by hopefuls seeking entrée to Madoff. Jaffe would refer potential investors to Madoff for vetting. If the financial matchmaking was successful, Jaffe's reward was a point or two on the first successful trade — a "common practice in the business," he said.
Access to Madoff could be attained in other ways as well. Several hedge funds were among Madoff's "feeder funds" — if an investor couldn't get a coveted spot from Madoff directly, he could still get in through one of the feeder funds.
They, too, vaporized last Thursday when one hedge fund — rumored to be Palm Beach resident Walter Noel's Fairfield/Greenwich Group — asked for the return of its $7 billion and cash-strapped Madoff was unable to deliver.
"If that hedge fund hadn't asked for his money back, nobody would have known," Shapiro said. "It would still be going on."

[Exile]

When I called it out in Ja all a de so called Gurus' jumped up and shouted...so I kept my little money to myself...still have a little...but I have friends who lost a good bit from Smith and Co. plus others....

[MdmeX]

Greed, greed, and more greed.

Let's see how much jail time the thiefing son of a gun will get.

[Islandman]

It takes a strong person not to get sucked in to these things when you friends and family into it and look like them making big money.

[Me]

Have they lost from Smith and Co. because of his operations or because the govt and big players made sure to cripple him?

[Assasin]

when a man can trick HSBC and other big bank like that you know him good.

Nuff people only a talk because if things neer come to light and man hear man a mek money them would a chance it too.

Mi know people who a run business from Wappy kill Phillop and them still invest in Olint. People sometimes figet how smart these people are.

[Assasin]

memba a nuh just greed. The man cook the books too so people who think them a invest in a sound company was tricked, for all I know my 401 K could have been invested in there because if them show that it making annual return of 10% over the past 10 years legal, many of us would a dive in.

[Me]

when a man can trick HSBC and other big bank like that you know him good.

Nuff people only a talk because if things neer come to light and man hear man a mek money them would a chance it too.

Mi know people who a run business from Wappy kill Phillop and them still invest in Olint. People sometimes figet how smart these people are.

Him only trick them in the method of his returns. The folks at all the reputable instittutions thought he was getting his returns through illegal insider trading.

They all knew his strategy could not generate the returns that he was getting.

[Mosiah]

It takes a strong person not to get sucked in to these things when you friends and family into it and look like them making big money.

Look like?!? Some people made millions in straight up profit! 10s of millions, even!

[Assasin]

You think some of the people who invested with him even know what insider trading is?

Some know him as a reputable ex-wall street big wig, and as he himself confessed he cooked the books.