Author: Tamar Frankel File Type: pdf In a Ponzi scheme, new investments are used to pay existing investors, to cover the cost of salespersons, and to finance the Ponzi schemers satisfying lifestyle. Although Charles Ponzi recruited investors in Boston in 1919 and died in 1949, his design and mode of operation are alive and well today. Indeed, losses from Ponzi schemes in the United States are equal to losses from shoplifting. Ponzi schemes catch in their net highly sophisticated individuals and institutions as well as low-income and middle-income investors, and these schemes have attracted investors all over the world, in Russia, England, India, Albania, Romania, Portugal, Costa Rica, and elsewhere. Looking into the innumerable cases of Ponzi schemes throughout the years, Tamar Frankel observes that even though patterns began to emerge in the stories of con artists and their victims behavior, the main puzzles still remain How do con artists dazzle and lure wealthy and educated individuals and representatives of large institutions to hand over huge sums of money? How do con artists divert investors attention from the soft spots of their stories? And while there are so many books and articles about Ponzi schemes, their warnings and constant advice on how to detect and avoid con artists go unheeded. In The Ponzi Scheme Puzzle, Frankel explores con artists fascinating power of persuasion and deception, and analyzes their subtle signals that mimic truth and honesty. She identifies the reasons for the local and global success and longevity of such schemes and seeks to understand the nature of the con artists and their victims. She combines the many stories of Ponzi schemes, derived mostly from court cases and newspaper articles, to show the patterns of such frauds, the nature of the con artists, and character of their victims. These patterns tell us much about human nature, about our society, and about ourselves. The book first analyzes the design and pattern of the con artists attractive offers and how they hide deceptions, then deals with the ways in which schemes are advertised and sold. Next, it focuses on the core of con artists success, then discusses the characters of con artists and their victims. Finally, Frankel offers a number of observations on the lessons we can learn from these stories and analyses. She concludes that our attitude to con artists is ambivalent and uncertain perhaps because their behavior is so close to the behavior of honest people or perhaps because they act like the social leaders with whom they are likely to mingle, or perhaps their actions are necessary to shake up a complacent society. Therefore, she writes, self-protection from charming, dangerous con artists must involve self-examination once we recognize our own tendencies we can better protect ourselves from their toxic attraction.

Author: Michael Moorcock File Type: epub Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, or Pyat, that charming but despicable mythomaniac who first appeared in Byzantium Endures, is back in this second book of the Pyat quartet. Having fled Bolshevik Russia in late 1919, Pyats progress is a series of leaps from crisis to crisis, as he begins affairs with a baroness and a Greek prostitute while undertaking schemes to build flying machines in Europe and the United States. His devotion to flamboyantly racist, particularly anti-Semitic doctrineslike his devotion to cocaineremains unabated, and he both sings the praises of Mussolini and lectures across America for the Ku Klux Klan. Meanwhile, his best-kept secret is the fact that he is Jewish. As the novel ends, Pyat is in Hollywoodhis new Byzantiumhobnobbing with movie stars and dreaming of making films like those of his hero, D.W. Griffith. This authoritative edition brings this book back into print after 30 years and boasts a new introduction by Alan Wall.**ReviewThis is a rich, ambitious and erudite book. . . . If one purpose of fiction is to lead us into different worlds and, as Virginia Woolf says, to make of them some kind of whole, then Michael Moorcock succeeds brilliantly. Carolyn Slaughter, GuardianThe Laughter of Carthage and its companion volumes will be seen . . . as an imaginative record of our own time rather than as a simple reconstruction of that which has gone. Peter Ackroyd, Sunday TimesMichael Moorcock is an absolute wizard of a storyteller. . . . It is marvelous to meet a novelist who has the energy for the epic. It is not simply a case of energy, Mr. Moorcock is also a storyteller, an old-fashioned button-holing, 19th-century storyteller. Stanley Reynolds, PunchAbout the Author Michael Moorcock is an award-winning author of more than 80 works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Cornelius Quartet, Doctor Who, and Elric The Stealer of Souls. He has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, and British Science Fiction awards and is a Grandmaster of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. His nonfiction has appeared in Financial Times, the Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Bastrop, Texas. Alan Wall is a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, an essayist, and a professor of writing and literature at the University of Chester. His novels include Bless the Thief, China, The Lightning Cage, The School of Night, and Sylvies Riddle.