Everyone by now is familiar with Ponzi schemes. The loose definition describes a scam whereby someone takes funds from an investor and skips. But there are variations and degrees of scam sophistication.
Generally, a so-called money manager takes funds from investors and after a while decides to use at least some of the funds for himself. He pays off original investors with funds received from new investors.When everyone wants their money back at once, and there isn’t enough to give them, the frauds are uncovered.
But there are many schemes which, unfortunately, escape notoriety. They are Ponzi schemes, but are never labeled as such. Take Social Security as the perfect example
It started off as a so-called insurance program, but never was comparable to what you get from a private company. There are no locked-up reserves. Active workers were taxed so that they could get future retirement benefits only from taxes placed on other, active. workers.(See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at Twitter.)
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