3 ms·

A Ponzi scheme has no business other than selling ahead Charles Ponzi arbitraged postage coupons (and resorted to selling ahead when that failed to turn profit

• jerf 15y ago
  All the sources I found online suggested that he started with the stamp selling, possibly legitimately, then transitioned into what we now call a Ponzi scheme, on a scale that could not possibly have been a result of the putative business. "It was uncovered that, in order to reach the level of investments that were made, 160 million coupons would have needed to be issued. In reality, only 27,000 had been. Soon afterward, Ponzi was arrested and indicted." [1] It wasn't a Ponzi scheme until he took the step into fradulent payouts. As skeptical as I am about Groupon, it may work, in that it is not impossible by four orders of magnitude. Maybe they've got some brilliant pivot planned. Ponzi could never have made good using his putative business plan without fundamentally rewriting mathematics. But the real point isn't even that his plan was impossible, but that he wasn't executing the putative plan. Groupon is definitely soliciting businesses and issuing coupons. [1]: http://www.mijiki.com/what-is-a-ponzi-scheme.html http://www.mijiki.com/what-is-a-ponzi-scheme.html - I mean this to show my work here, I'm not sure that's a trustworthy site.