Bernie Madoff has died

In that situation, the inability to eat it or shoot something with it is probably going to make gold/silver pretty close to worthless as well until society re-exists.

Even if the US government ceases to exist, the features of non reproducibility built into cash dollars (watermarks, intaglio printing) would still exist although they won't be as ultimately durable into the future as an element. At least you can also use them as fire starters.

"They call me either Uncle Bernie or Mr. Madoff. I can't walk anywhere without someone shouting their greetings and encouragement, to keep my spirit up. It's really quite sweet, how concerned everyone was about my well being, including the staff... It's much safer here than walking the streets of New York."

Still blown away that he was basically just putting the funds in a Chase bank account and not even investing it.

> In a 2013 email to CNBC from prison, Madoff claimed the break in the market that started the Great Recession led to his scam.

> “I thought this would be only a short-term trade which could be made up once the market became receptive,” he wrote. “The rest is my tragic history of never being able to recover.”

> In fact, investigators said, Madoff did not execute a single trade for his advisory clients for years. Rather than employing a so-called split-strike conversion strategy as he claimed, he simply deposited investors’ funds in a Chase bank account, paying off new customers with funds from earlier customers — a classic pyramid scheme — and providing his clients with falsified account statement. The investment “returns” shown on those statements — some $50 billion in all — were pure fiction.

> The scandal at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities shattered investor confidence, which was already damaged by the financial crisis. And it led to sweeping changes at the Securities and Exchange Commission, which missed the fraud for years despite repeated warnings, including from independent investigator Harry Markopolos, who set out to analyze Madoff’s improbable returns and pronounced them fraudulent as early as 2000.

It was also a failure of regulators, the whole thing could have been avoided with some basic checks.

> A subsequent investigation by the agency’s inspector general, H. David Kotz, found that rather than following up on clear evidence of fraud, SEC enforcement staffers decided to take Madoff’s word that his operation was legitimate.

> “When Madoff provided evasive or contradictory answers to important questions in testimony, they simply accepted as plausible his explanations,” Kotz wrote.

Chase eventually ended up having to pay some fines and changed reporting, but ultimately it is amazing he pulled it off with just money in an account. Banks will do pretty much anything it seems as long as you are capitalizing them as FinCEN reports show.

>In the end, in addition to Madoff, more than a dozen individuals, including Peter Madoff, were convicted of federal crimes, but none of the others was accused of knowing about the fraud. JPMorgan Chase, Madoff’s primary bank, paid $2.6 billion to the U.S. government and Madoff victims in 2014 to settle allegations that it did not maintain adequate controls. After Chase instituted some unspecified reforms, prosecutors dropped charges against the bank.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/14/bernie-madoff-dies-mastermin...

Eh, I'm comfortable calling Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme because all profits extracted by early investors come from later investors.

That's, like, a very specific and applicable definition.

I like the % of income idea.