Ken Fisher is a money manager, Forbes columnist, and is one of the Forbes 400 richest Americans. He is also author of several books, including his two latest, a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470285362?ie=UTF8tag=antiquestocka-20linkCode=as2camp=1789creative=9325creativeASIN=0470285362"The Ten Roads to Riches: The Ways the Wealthy Got There (And How You Can Too!) (Fisher Investments Press)/aimg src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=antiquestocka-20l=as2o=1a=0470285362" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" / and a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/047052653X?ie=UTF8tag=antiquestocka-20linkCode=as2camp=1789creative=9325creativeASIN=047052653X"How to Smell a Rat: The Five Signs of Financial Fraud (Fisher Investments Press)/aimg src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=antiquestocka-20l=as2o=1a=047052653X" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /br /br /Ken Fisher Interview Part 4br /br /span style="font-weight:bold;"Stockerblog/span: I wanted to talk just a bit about con men versus con women. Do you see more women becoming con artists in the future or do you think it will primarily be men?br /br /span style="font-weight:bold;"Fisher/span: The history, as I mentioned in the book a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/047052653X?ie=UTF8tag=antiquestocka-20linkCode=as2camp=1789creative=9325creativeASIN=047052653X"How to Smell a Rat/aimg src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=antiquestocka-20l=as2o=1a=047052653X" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; ...

Many Americans, and indeed many people the world over, have lived in a Ponzi bubble economy for more than a decade. They have applied the Greater Fool Theory in the false belief that they would always be able to sell their house or their stocks or bonds or other highly leveraged assets to “bigger fools” than they were for buying them in the first place. With the collapse of the housing bubble and the stock market it begs the question “Who is the ‘greater fool’ now?”

A Ponzi bubble? Yes, after Charles Ponzi, a Bostonian with an eye for get-rich quick schemes who, back in 1918, identified an arbitrage situation which he promoted as being able to generate sizeable returns for those who invested with him. He delivered on his promise by making his close friends and a small circle of investors very rich, very quickly, and, as word spread among …

Many professionals are now asking what exactly is a ponzi scheme? How do you define what a ponzi scheme is and how do they work? Here is a video on ponzi schemes and how they work. If you are reading this article over email through our daily hedge fund newsletter please click here now to view the embedded video below.

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Give us Madoff! Give us Madoff!  “Oil rises to $39 on Bernanke comments…”  “Asian stocks rise after Bernanke remarks…” When they turned out the lights and closed the doors in New York last night, the Dow had lost 25 points and oil had gone down to $37. But this morning, investors seem to be feeling better about things. What did Bernanke say to bring about the turnaround?

We find the report on the front page of the International Herald Tribune:

“More capital injections and guarantees may become necessary to ensure stability and the normalization of credit markets,” said the main man at the Fed, speaking to an audience at the London School of Economics.

He went on to say that he didn’t necessarily like bailing out Wall Street, but it “appears unavoidable.”

Nothing particularly exciting about that. But then we turn to page 12:

“Bernanke warns that bigger bailouts needed around the world,” is the

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There is a saying in the world of Austrian economics about the business cycle. The puzzle is not to explain business failures. Those are part of the normal course of life, and the sign of a healthy economy. The puzzle is to explain the “cluster of errors” that appears at the beginning of a recession. How could so many have been so wrong about so much at the same time? The business cycle is a system-wide failure, not merely the mistaken judgment of a few. So it is with Madoff’s scheme. The mystery isn’t how one person was able to fool a few. The scheme in which yesterday’s “investors” are paid off with the money of today’s victims is known in all places and probably all times - and it always goes belly up to the originator’s complete disgrace. It is a classic example of how moral laws are self-enforcing in ...

Who can honestly say he isn’t enjoying this financial crisis? It has unhorsed cavalier fund managers …it has turned the masters of the universe into servile waiters…it has made Nobel Prize winners look like morons. The rich…the proud… the pompous…the vain…the incompetent…Wall Street - surely there is a God…an ‘invisible hand’…giving them all a whack on the head!

And there are the regulators too! Under their very noses the biggest scams in history went unnoticed. America’s SEC alone - to say nothing of the countless other cops on the financial beat - had 3,371 employees playing the piano in 2006. If you can believe it, not a single one of them noticed what was going on in the back room. Even after rummaging through Bernard Madoff’s back office twice in the last three years, they still didn’t know. They must have been like pets watching an orgy…with no idea what to

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The ground is giving way beneath our feet: Sell the dollar…Sell Treasuries.   People still stand their ground…they do not panic. They do the right thing. But then, they go into work – but find they have no jobs. They look at their pension account – wisely invested in a diversified portfolio – and find that it has lost half its value. And their houses lose 20% of their value. In places such as San Diego, Las Vegas and Miami, the losses are more like 30%- 40%. The ground gives way…and they find themselves in Hell.

Friday, the Dow registered a 61 point improvement, after much disappointment the day before. Is the rally on or off? We don’t know…

But what MUST happen, WILL happen. Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly. And bubbles gotta pop. The bubble in private debt has popped already. And now, the bubble in public debt has to

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em’Bernard L. span class=”blsp-spelling-error” id=”SPELLING_ERROR_0″Madoff/span Investment Securities span class=”blsp-spelling-error” id=”SPELLING_ERROR_1″LLC/span harks back to an earlier era in the financial world: The owner’s name is on the door. Clients know that Bernard span class=”blsp-spelling-error” id=”SPELLING_ERROR_2″Madoff/span has a personal interest in maintaining the unblemished record of value, fair-dealing, and high ethical standards that has always been the firm’s hallmark.’/embr /em/embr /div align=”justify”It harks back to an earlier era all right, that of Charles Ponzi, famed fraudster in the 1920’s; this looks like the world’s biggest ever financial fraud (well, excluding the US housing market), with investor losses estimated from $17span class=”blsp-spelling-error” id=”SPELLING_ERROR_4″bn/span to $50span class=”blsp-spelling-error” id=”SPELLING_ERROR_5″bn/span. I always recall as a rookie span class=”blsp-spelling-corrected” id=”SPELLING_ERROR_6″buy side/span analyst meeting a fast-growing and highly rated equipment leasing company that was seeking secondary funding; the CEO, a charismatic self-made millionaire with a luxuriant moustache made an enthusiastic pitch. My boss didn’t say much during the …