carlo ponzi

As i promised im going to write an article about what a ponzi scheme is. This is taken from marc faber's book tomorrow's gold pages 176-178.

in fact, every mania involves some sort of Ponzi scheme. Carlo ponzi was a swindler who, in 1920, devised something akin to a chain letter, whereby early investors were paid out of money invested by late buyers. Ponzi promised to pay 50% interest for the use of 45 days' deposits, based on a strategy to arbitrage international postal union coupons bought with depreciated exchange rates abroad and to exchange them at higher fixed exchange rates for US stamps (for which coupons could be redeemed) in the us. The scheme was purely fictitious. Ponzi took in close to us$8million, but had only us$61 worth of stamps in his office when arrested. His “pyramid” scheme, the success of which depended on attracting new depositors at an ever-accelerating rate, collapsed when a number of depositors began to suspect that they wouldn't get their money back and attempted to withdraw their funds.

Ponzi schemes resurface from time to time in emerging economies where a sufficiently large number of naive people can be found who believe that 50% returns on short-term deposits can be achieved. However, it is a fact that for most investments, sooner or later, early buyers will be paid out by late buyers. This would seem to be particularly true in the case of investment booms and manias, which require a large number of participants to fuel and maintain the upward price momentum. The boom ends when the amount of money flowing into the popular investment theme starts to decelerate, as buyers become suspicious about the sustainability of positive returns, or when the supply eventually exceeds the demand. Thus, the early buyers of us stocks in the 1920's, 1960's and 1990's did well, while the latecomers were badly burnt by the subsequent market declines. The same was true of the gold and silver booms, and of the japanese stock market bubble in the 1980's.

In fact, i would argue that one of the principal features of an investment bubble is the existence of a giant ponzi scheme. Entrepreneurs no longer start businesses with the objective of achieving recurring profits from their investments, but rather seek to set up ventures in order to flog them off to speculators through IPOs and secondary offerings. At the same time, investors almost totally abandon the concept of investing according to strict value criteria and real economic merit. Instead they purchase stocks solely because they figure that, as more and more people join the investment party, someone - “the greater fool” - will be willing to pay an even higher price than they did for their stocks.

Ponzi schemes raise some fascinating questions.why are so many people repeatedly fooled by them? And why did carlo ponzi's scheme fail in less than a year, while other similar schemes have lasted so much longer? Investors get caught again and again in ponzi-type chains because of the very high returns they promise. Had carlo ponzi promised to pay a return of only 2% in 45 days' deposit (102% annually), no one would have bothered to invest with him. But with the promise to pay 50% for such a deposit (162,450% annually), he was able to attract quite a sum, considering that he was operating only from boston. His main problem was the regional scope of his scheme. Had he been able to operate globally with the support of cnbc, cnn, internet chatrooms and a variety of questionable stock advisory services, his operation could have flourished for much longer. The money flows that financed his operation would have continued for as long as the incoming funds were sufficient to pay out the redeeming investors. And the longer this had continued, the more confident the investing crowd would have become in the merits of his financing skills, possibly to the extent of attracting even central banks to invest their reserves with him. Morever, ponzi's promised returns were such that even if interest rates had risen 10% per annum, they wouldn't have jeopardised his scheme. It was his inability to raise money fast enough and the loss of investors' confidence that brought him down.

Now suppose that ponzi had reinvested himself. Instead of a questionable character operating regionally in boston and promising to pay 50% for 45 days' deposits, we have the credible and proven capitalistic system and alan greenspan as well as the us treasury guaranteeing that every time there is a crisis there will be a bail-out – as was the case in mexico, asia, ltcm and most recently brazil. Thus, the system and alan greenspan, and not carlo ponzi, were vested by the global investing public with the power to underwrite a 20% per annum return for the us stock market, as was the case from 1982 to 2000. even better, the system and greenspan, supported and cheered on by the media, were believed to guarantee an almost 100% annual gain from investing in a basket of technology stocks, which was the return of the nasdaq 100 a few years leading up to the march 2000 (up nine times in five years and almost four times from 1998 to 2000).

a ponzi scheme may not fly with a 20% guaranteed annual return, but a sure 100% return is a tempting proposition for any investor. So, for as long as the nasdaq could sustain these returns, ebullient investors reallocated more and more money from conservative investments such as short-dated bonds, money market funds, cds, abd even value stocks, into the high-tech sector. Even rising interest rates cannot derail this process, because the returns promised by a ponzi scheme are so much higher than interest rates.

The breaking point, however, is reached when insufficient new money flows into the market, or the supply of equities begins to exceed the demand, and investors start to experience significant capital losses. Only when this happens do investors lose confidence and scramble for the exit, bringing about a meltdown. This was apparent in the us when, in 1999, a total of 555 companies went public (an all-time record) and raised us$73.6 billion. But that us$73.6 billion represented only 27% of tge issuing companies' market caps. In 2000, however, the lock-up period for most of these issues expired and, in addition to the then prevailing heavy new-issue calendar (in early 2000, there were weeks when new issues raised over us$8 billion), insiders were able to sell more than us$200 billion of previously locked-up shares.