Charles Ponzi

Arrivederci.

Speaking of Travis, I mean, this kind of checks out a little bit, but he's been named as a victim of a Ponzi scheme.

What is a Ponzi scheme? It's

when they use your money to pay out other people.

Is Ponzi a guy? Like, is it Lewis Ponzi?

Like Lewis Capaldi.

Yeah, anyway,

I love that word.

taught.

Ponzi didn't.

Charles Ponzi didn't invite the Ponzi scheme.

It was called the Peter Paul scam before Ponzi.

The guy who really taught him was First Jersey Securities, which goes way back.

This guy was a master stock manipulator.

Using money from new investors to pay out existing investors was first popularized by an Italian con man in the 1920s.

Charles Ponzi.

That's the answer right there, but you got a bonus.

The king, the OG.

It's a profession.

There's several different industries.

You know what I mean? We talked about Charles Ponzi.

That's the financial market, right? But then you have love fraudsters like the Tinder swindler.

oh chucky of course Chuckie.

Charles Ponzi.

Charles Ponzi.

Yeah, yeah.

Chuckie.

I represent receivers, trustees.

I act as a receiver.

I represent banks, insurance companies, institutional investors, and victims of large-scale Ponzi and other financial crimes.

It's a volatility that we've backed out of the options price and it's a forward looking expectation of volatility rather than something calculated from historic data now that then leads us to things like indexes of volatility so there's things like the VIX index and that is an index of implied volatility from S&P 500 options and so essentially the VIX index is an index telling us what the prices of options are telling us how volatile option traders think the S&P will be over the next short period now I won't go too deeply into this but actually that's even an interesting thing on its own because originally the VIX was just an index that was sort of provided for informational purposes and then after that the VIX became such a big thing that people wanted to trade futures on the VIX options on the VIX and then it almost has flipped such that people take VIX futures and use those to price options you know so it's a kind of a bit of a circular argument at this point but anyhow maybe I'll save that discussion for a future video so that's it for today's video I've sort of slowed down on doing weekend videos just because I've noticed that no one watches my videos on the weekend so I'm just doing Monday to Friday videos at the moment but This weekend I'm planning on putting up two videos that are quite different to this type of video.

There's one on Charles Ponzi and one on Bernie Madoff simply because in the class that I teach, I cover Bernie Madoff in the class and I kind of look at what someone who's knowledgeable about options, is there a giveaway that Bernie Madoff was a fraud? And so rather than kind of do the class like I'm doing right now, what I've done is I've sort of created a slideshow slash, you know, almost a documentary type thing.

That's going a bit far to call it a documentary.

I've created two videos that I'll put up over the weekend.

So he, this young man, figured he could do the same and come back with a bunch of money and reestablish his family's former wealth.

And with his family's blessing, Charles Ponzi went to the United States.

Okay.

Arriving in Boston on November 15th, 1903 on the SS Vancouver.

Okay.

Yeah.

Now, Charles Ponzi had very compelling eyes.

He had a very easy smile that bordered on a smirk, which just kind of belied a magnetic kind of charisma.

The book really leans into these financial and corporate con men to show how the scale of the lie escalates with technology.

We get the origin story of Charles Ponzi.

The Ponzi scheme itself.

Yeah.

An Italian immigrant who created a scheme in the 1920s based on the completely mundane idea of international postal reply coupons.

And he was simply paying early investors with the money handed over by new investors.

A structure so devastatingly simple and effective that his surname became the permanent definition of the crime.

And the text naturally progresses to Bernie Madoff, who took the exact same architectural blueprint as Ponzi, but scaled it to an unimaginable $50 billion over a period of decades.

And that's why it cracks me up also when people are like, "Oh, uh, you know, Maxwell's going to a country club." Nah, there's no federal prison that's a country club, okay? None of them.

The Atlanta prison, 120-year-old relic in Ossoff's home state, once housed the country's most notorious criminals, including gangster Al Capone, James Whitey Bulger, and Carlo Ponzi, the namesake of the Ponzi scheme.

Today, it's a crumbling medium-security facility, no longer a penitentiary in the true sense of the term, with about 900 male inmates, including people awaiting trial.

So look, we need to go through the whole entire Federal Bureau of Prisons with a red pen and fix it.

And that's why it cracks me up also when people are like, "Oh, uh, you know, Maxwell's going to a country club." Nah, there's no federal prison that's a country club, okay? None of them.

The Atlanta prison, a hundred-and-twenty-year-old relic in Ossoff's home state, once housed the country's most notorious criminals, including gangster Al Capone, James Whitey Bulger, and Carlo Ponzi, the namesake of the Ponzi scheme.

Today, it's a crumbling medium-security facility, no longer a penitentiary in the true sense of the term, with about nine hundred male inmates, including people awaiting trial.

So look, we need to go through the whole entire Federal Bureau of Prisons with a red pen and fix it.