Ponzi Quotes & Sayings

Capitalism is not the simple desire to make a profit. Capitalism is the fantasy that growth can continue at a consistent rate indefinitely. When a child is young, it cannot yet imagine being an adult, so it thinks it will keep on growing forever. The fantasy that you can grow forever is exhilarating, one of the many aspects that make children seem so alive. We live in fantasy, all of us, all of the time, to a greater or lesser extent. — Jacob Wren

I think that fact alone levels everything. Slapstick amazes me, the folly of humans today, the Ponzi schemes, giving birth to eight babies at once, it's amazing ... And I know, it's horrible to have your money stolen and all that, but those are amazing stories. — Laurel Nakadate

The notion of ever more old people needing ever more young people, who in turn will grow old and need ever more young people and so on, ad infinitum, is an obvious ecological Ponzi scheme. — David Attenborough

The retirement age needs to be raised. A portion of Social Security ought to be privatized, if not all. And there probably needs to be some means testing. It's a Ponzi scheme that's not sustainable. — Gary Johnson

Each exposure of previously secret misdeeds - steroid use, Ponzi schemes, rigged intelligence - produces an acute and debilitating psychological effect. — Christopher L. Hayes

Spoofing? No. Ponzi scheme? Not at all! Just finance. Legal as hell. — Kim Stanley Robinson

The Republican candidates are talking about ways to transition this program and it is a monstrous lie. It is a ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today that you're paying into a program that's going to there. Anybody that's for the status quo with Social Security today is involved with a monstrous lie to our kids, and it's not right. — Rick Perry

I went looking for trouble, and I found it. — Charles Ponzi

Take the money and run. — Woody Allen

The federal government has made explicit and implicit promises to millions of people, but has put no money aside in order to keep those promises. Some of you may wonder where Bernie Madoff got the idea for his Ponzi scheme. Clearly he was studying federal entitlement policy. — John C. Goodman

It should be clear that modern fractional reserve banking is a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by those receipts. — Murray Rothbard

The amount of sympathy you get from having an illness is paid out like a Ponzi scheme and psychiatric disorders are all the way at the bottom. — Nenia Campbell

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. — Mitchell Zuckoff

Ponzi had been in Brazil, and then Argentina, where he bought a boardinghouse populated by prostitutes, along with a hot dog stand. He had hoped it would be the start of a national chain. — Glenn Beck

Ponzi schemes don't trickle down, they siphon up. — Heather Marsh

The economy is a ponzi scheme. People are working harder than they ever have for less wages, but we have so many bobbles because manufacturing has come up so quickly over the past hundred years that people have the illusion of wealth. — Alex Jones

The welfare state may be well-intentioned, but it is a Ponzi scheme — Dennis Prager

There is no need for an end to fish, or to fishing for that matter. But there is an urgent need for governments to free themselves from the fishing-industrial complex and its Ponzi scheme, to stop subsidizing the fishing-industrial complex and awarding it fishing rights, when it should in fact pay for the privilege to fish. — Daniel Pauly

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. — Alex Berenson

Madoff's scam was small compared to Ponzi schemes the government itself runs: Social Security and Medicare. — John Stossel

A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived. — Paul Samuelson

All ponzi schemes are upheld by a centripetal force caused by those orbiting the circles of power, celebrity and wealth and trying to get in. When the ponzi scheme reaches its point of maximum growth, the force disperses and the ponzi scheme collapses. — Heather Marsh

I know that plenty of folks have issues with Social Security, but I'd urge them to confront it on its own terms. Calling it a Ponzi scheme is misleading and does more to cloud the issue than it does to illuminate it. And yes, I do know that unless changes are made, the current system is unsustainable. But that doesn't mean it's fraud. — Mitchell Zuckoff

Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known. — George Will

It was in Las Vegas that Eisman and his associates' attitude toward the U.S. bond market hardened into something like its final shape. As Vinny put it, "That was the moment when we said, 'Holy shit, this isn't just credit. This is a fictitious Ponzi scheme.'" In Vegas the question lingering at the back of their minds ceased to be, Do these bond market people know something we do not? It was replaced by, Do they deserve merely to be fired, or should they be put in jail? Are they delusional, or do they know what they're doing? Danny thought that the vast majority of the people in the industry were blinded by their interests and failed to see the risks they had created. Vinny, always darker, said, "There were more morons than crooks, but the crooks were higher up. — Michael Lewis

Because revelations of systemic deception erode our most basic, default expectation of good faith, they play an outsize role in producing a crisis of authority. Each exposure of previously secret misdeeds - steroid use, Ponzi schemes, rigged intelligence - produces an acute and debilitating psychological effect. Vertigo sets in, similar to that experienced by a spouse who, after decades of what he thought was a happy, loyal marriage, discovers his wife has been cheating all along. Suddenly we realize we live in a world entirely more depraved than the one we thought we inhabited. — Christopher L. Hayes

Madoff Securities is the world's largest Ponzi scheme. — Harry Markopolos

I landed in this country with $2.50 in cash and $1 million in hopes, and those hopes never left me, — Charles Ponzi

The only reason there is a crisis about Social Security in the US and pensions in Europe and Japan is that you cannot maintain a "Ponzi" scheme indefinitely. We have collected from today's young to pay today's old and counted on tomorrow's young to keep doing so. That was a fine scheme as long as the number of young people was rising faster than old people. When that ratio comes to an end, such a system also has to end. — Milton Friedman

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. — Amy Goodman

Social Security is unsustainable because it is not meeting the first order condition of a Ponzi scheme, namely expanding the pool of suckers. — Walter E. Williams

Social security isn't a ponzi scheme. It's not bankrupting us. It's not an outrage. It is working. — Rachel Maddow

Assyria soon discovered a painful truth: empires are like Ponzi schemes: financial frauds in which previous investors are paid returns out of new investors' deposits. The costs of holding imperial territory can only be underwritten by loot and tribute extracted by constant new conquests; empires must continue to expand if they are not to collapse. — Paul Kriwaczek

What is interesting is that elephants can accurately and reliably figure out who is friend and who is foe. Compare this to us humans, who still walk down dark alleys at night, fall for Ponzi schemes, and buy lemons from used-car salesmen. — Jodi Picoult

My favorite pre-Ponzi schemer was known as '520 Percent Miller' because he promised 10 percent returns a week, or 520 percent a year. Of course he was just using new investors' money to pay old investors, and soon he was on the lam. — Mitchell Zuckoff

The whole government is a Ponzi scheme. — Bernard Madoff

Remember we don't have a crystal ball and all business is risky no matter what company you are joining Ponzi or not. This will never change no matter what you're doing so let's make sure you have a plan b and c or more. — Cory Crabb

If you have a sane economy, and by sane economy I mean one which is not addicted to debt, not a Ponzi economy, then the change in debt each year should contribute a minor amount to demand. Therefore, if you tried to correlate debt to the level of unemployment you would not find much of a correlation. Unfortunately that is not the economy we live in. — Steve Keen

Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff-like callousness by the world's fisheries. — Daniel Pauly

The financial system as a whole has had the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme if we look at it fundamentally. — Tim Lee

Now, through an act as simple as walking across a stage and collecting an empty plastic folder representing a degree, our stock had plummeted to nothing, the wretched leavings of some cosmic Ponzi scheme. A lifetime's worth of planning and training and delusion gone with the wind. Some of us were moving home to live free of charge in our parents' guest rooms, or if we were thin enough, heading west to try our luck in L.A.; others, to our collective horror, were being forced to work at actual jobs. — Rachel Shukert

We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme. — Douglas Rushkoff

There are tons of examples of U.K. and European mistakes. A classic one is pensions. That's obviously not an America-specific thing. The British and European economies are suffering under the weight of what is to come. The next great Ponzi scheme after Madoff is probably pensions. — Dambisa Moyo

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. — Mitchell Zuckoff

All of which is mostly bullshit. The reality is that it's just like any other Ponzi scheme: the guys at the top are doing pretty well, but the guys on the bottom are doing Amway pitches in trailer parks. — Tod Goldberg

The welfare state may be well intended but it is a Ponzi scheme. People are paying in to support the people who previously paid in, but there isn't enough coming in, so it will collapse, like eery Ponzi scheme does. By the way, I had the author of a biography on Ponzi on my show. Ponzi was a good guy. He just got messed up and so he had to keep collecting money to pay the other people who paid in earlier. He didn't mean bad.
Ponzi turns out to be somewhat of a Saint. He heard of a girl who was in a fire, and he gave his own skin for her skin grafts. A total stranger.
Ponzi is the quintessential Liberal. Means well, and creates something destructive. — Dennis Prager