Chapter 86: Proper Conduct (1)
Once upon a time, back when Nazi Germany was still gassing people, there lived a man named Charles Ponzi.
He employed an incredible investment technique that promised consistent, high returns. The method? Using the money from new investors to pay the old ones.
Of course, Ponzi wasn’t the first to pull off the trick of robbing Peter to pay Paul. But his brilliance lay in systematizing and modernizing the scheme—transforming it into something scalable.
Everyone learned the technique named after him and came to love it. Even now, decades later.
But there was one problem with it: though everyone could understand the mechanics of the game, actually succeeding at it was extraordinarily difficult.
Even those who managed to pull it off for years could lose everything in a single failure. So calling such a person a fraud wasn’t all that unfair.
***
A few months earlier.
I was sitting with Ha Yeong-il, discussing things in detail.
“Madoff definitely took a loss this time. But he’s still paying his investors as if nothing happened.”
“...If that’s true... isn’t this a Ponzi scheme?”
Exactly.