Mitchell Zuckoff 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.

A typical Ponzi scheme involves taking money from investors, then paying them off with money taken from new investors, rather than paying them from actual earnings.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment.

Venture capitalists are professional money managers. We are provided capital to invest as long as we can return it to our investors with a strong return in a reasonable amount of time. A strong return is three times cash on cash. A reasonable amount of time is ten years max.

Mutual funds dare to be average. In fact, they dare to be lousy. They have long since ceased striving for anything resembling perfection when it comes to managing your money.

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.

We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.

I got a chain letter by fax. It's very simple. You just fax a dollar bill to everybody on the list.

Currency trading is unnecessary, unproductive and totally immoral.

The Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company will pay on demand to bearer Three Dollars.

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.