Scams

The down time at BlueWater Partners (http://bluewater.ky/) is always interesting. I don’t think that would be too surprising to many people. When men work in high pressure jobs, handling large sums of money, things tend to get a little unpredictable during the breaks. Bond traders are notorious for this sort of behavior. A bond trader will work at warp speeds for hours at a time manning several telephone lines and computer screens simultaneously, and then bam, everything stops, and traders find themselves staring at one another in a minor daze. I knew of one bond trader in New York who caught mice and threw them out the window after making little parachutes for them during the down time. Things get weird. Conversations are often unrepeatable.

The talk the other day centered around the Bernard Madoff scam. It’s hard not to talk about Madoff, or “made-off” as I’ve heard him called recently, as in “he ‘made-off’ with all the money.” We started by talking about other scams, the original pyramid scheme of Charles Ponzi in the 1920’s to the Nigerian money laundering scheme that still surfaces every now and again. Madoff seems to have the biggest scam to date, at least in terms of dollars. The Albanian pyramid scheme of 1997 was the hands down biggest in terms of the numbers of people involved. It was estimated that two-thirds of that country’s entire population and government were caught up in it. Riots ensued when the whole thing collapsed, and the country still hasn’t fully recovered. But in terms of dollars, Madoff seems to have won a rather dubious prize.

Which led to the main topic of discussion – “Where is the money?”

If the totals that are being thrown around in the newspapers are remotely accurate, Madoff took hundreds of millions, and possibly billions of dollars. Think about that. In these days of billion dollar buyouts numbers get thrown around and lose their meaning. But he may have taken billions of dollars. A million dollars is a lot of money. If you spent a dollar a day for a million days you would have had to begin in the fifth century BC to be broke today. (without interest, of course.)

It was the esteemed consensus of BWP that a single man cannot spend that much money in his lifetime, never mind the forty or fifty years Madoff may have been at it. There just isn’t enough time in the day. It would take a foundation with many employees to spend at a fast enough rate. It’s a funny idea, not being able to spend a fixed amount of money, a Brewster’s Millions sort of fantasy, but think about it. If you stole one billion dollars, you would have to spend ten million dollars a day to make it disappear in a couple of decades. Now think about how much work it would be to spend ten million dollars a day every day for a couple of decades. If you gave it away in huge allotments. far too much attention would be drawn to you. Did he buy an estate a day for a year? A roomful of Picassos? Where are they? What a dilemma! So the question remains, where is the money?

I was reminded of a story I read many years ago. A man in France stole what is the equivalent to one million dollars in quarters. Do you know how much space you need to store a million dollars in quarters? What are you going to do with them? Sell them each for a nickel to neighborhood children? Go to quarter casino machines every day for eight hours? You would draw so much attention to yourself that you would be caught in weeks, which leads me to the what the police chief in charge of the case was quoted as saying, “Stealing this much money is its own punishment.”


By Myron Gushlak

There’re People in Those Countries

One of the benefits of my relationship with BlueWater Partners is the interesting and diverse people I meet. Last week, I had the opportunity to spend some time speaking with a young lady from the Czech Republic. She is from a modestly wealthy Czech family and her take on the Russia/Georgia issue was interesting. The Czechs are still just getting used to a return to private, non-government ownership of property after the Russians left last time. Her own family has re-taken ownership of property that was controlled by the Russians for over thirty years. She feels that every bite taken by Russia only increases their appetite for further acquisition.

She said the governments of the former USSR countries (as well as other countries with a history of being taken over, like Poland) are eager to have United States military bases or missile sites on their land, but the people aren’t so sure. The governments feel the United States presence will deter possible takeover attempts. The people remain unconvinced. Many feel it is just the beginning of yet another powerful country posturing to take control of their smaller sovereign nations. As a Canadian, I often fail to consider what it must be like to live in a country so tenuously situated in the world. I also sometimes forget that every time a country like Russia moves into a country like Georgia, millions of lives are disrupted. It’s not just the casualties of the fighting who suffer. It is the thousands of people who went to bed owning a family home, with all the history inherent in such a home, and waking up to find that a remote government has decided that the family property would be of better use to the state if it was owned by the government. It should have been obvious to me, perhaps, but the conversation was enlightening. These people are just like you and I. It’s easy to lose sight of that.

By Myron Gushlak