Bernie Madoff: ‘The whole government is a Ponzi scheme’

from Raw Story:



Bankers should be convicted, swindler tells NYMag

If there's one person who knows a Ponzi scheme, it's Bernie Madoff, the perpetrator of the largest one in world history. And now, locked away in prison, he claims that it wasn't just him, or even just the financial sector.

Madoff believes the entire US government is a Ponzi scheme.

In an interview with New York Magazine's Steve Fishman, Madoff sought to "set the record straight," and unloaded on the state of financial regulation in the United States and the impropriety of the banks. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/28/bernie-madoff-the-whole-government-is-a-ponzi-scheme/

Why does it take Bernie Madoff to get this very important fact in the newspaper?

Right here.

Scroll down to the first section heading, titled Red flags, black box.

It's just two paragraphs or so and a few bullet points.

Take a look at that and think about it.

PB

But, hey, as he notes, he only hurt those that he hurt -- well, as well as those that he helped, once it became known why they came out ahead.

People get shocked when people say SS is a ponzi scheme but it is the biggest one. There is no locked box, the money paid out is from the new checks collected and the only way they payback $2.6 trillion owed to SS is by double taxing. At least we now have a credible non political person spreading the message

What defines a Ponzi scheme is the collapse which occurs when new victims stop buying in and the old IOU's can no longer be paid because there is no money.

The US dollar is a fiat currency. The US government literally can not run out of dollars. The idea that we should put our fiat currency in a lock box is nonsensical. I use the analogy that it would be like keeping a file on your desktop full of alphabet letters which you can cut and paste into documents when you want to compose something. Why would you do that when you are free to type unlimited letters using your keyboard? There is no reason to save up alphabet letters on your computer and there is no reason for the issuer of a sovereign currency to save or store up its dollars.

so if you can print as much of the fiat money as you can, why collect SS payment in the 1st place and if you are not going to put it in a locked box then why give it to a broke, war mongering state like the US? You do understand that the only way the US govt pays back the money owed to the SS account is for them to tax us again for it.

The only reason why there is all this chatter about SS being in trouble is that the US govt still holding the 2.6 trillion owed and its probably never going to pay it back.

in the latest Rolling Stone titled "How Wall Street's Crooks Evaded Jail-Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?." 'Financial crooks brought down the world's economy - but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them' . . .

IIRC, Taibbi also wrote that the only person to go to prison was Bernie because he stole from rich folk. The rest merely paid paltry fines often less than $200K and kept the millions/billions stolen from shareholders. He names names, he does.

Unless the load it lightened, the structure will surely collapse.