yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

How A Ponzi Scheme Works


less than 1m read
·Nov 8, 2024

So you may have heard about Ponzi schemes in the news. Everybody knows they're illegal, but you might not understand how they work. So Ben is here to show us.

To start off, Ben gets a few people to invest their money with him. At the end of the year, he gives those clients amazing returns that beat every other investor in the market. Needless to say, the investors are thrilled. In fact, they're so ecstatic about all the money they're making that they tell all their friends and family about it too, who tell their friends, who tell their friends.

In the stock market, most investors make money some years and lose money others. But Ben's Ponzi scheme, yeah, it never loses money. In fact, it always beats the market by a huge margin.

But the returns he pays to these people aren't from actual profits. He just takes the money these new guys invest and gives it to these guys. But as soon as you can't get enough new money from this group to pay these people, then the whole pyramid starts to crumble because they're not getting paid anymore.

Ben, and these guys who invested first, made a killing, but these folks lost all their money. So the next time a guy like Ben tries to get you to invest in something that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Just ask Ben. Wahoo!

More Articles

View All
Bird Flight - Deep Dive #2 - Smarter Every Day 61
So, what do you do to hold a bird? Hold on tight and don’t be scared. That’s right! Okay, so today, on today’s deep dive here at Smarter Every Day, we’re going to learn about bird flight. When I went to Peru and shot high-speed video, I learned a whole lo…
GPT-4o (Omni) Human interaction demo w/ Sal Khan
Hello there! Can you see us? Yes, I can see you. How can I assist you today? So, um, I’m here with my son, and I’d love to see if you could drive a conversation that could help us get to know each other better. So, ask us questions and also ask us follo…
How NASA's Next Mars Mission Will Take the Red Planet's Pulse | Decoder
A ball of fire pierces the atmosphere of Mars, plummeting towards the surface at 13,200 miles per hour. This fireball across the horizon marks the end of a 301 million mile journey for NASA’s InSight and the beginning of a groundbreaking mission. For five…
Daily Live Homeroom With Sal: Wednesday, March 25
Hi everyone! Sal Khan here for our daily live stream. Just as a reminder of what this is for some of y’all who might be new: as the school closures have kind of rolled out around not just the country but the world, we realized that there’s a lot of demand…
Earth's First Selfie | Generation X
With you watching on a dark December night, the final Apollo mission blasts off. As the astronauts leave Earth behind, they do something remarkable: they take a family photo. As the astronauts were leaving Earth, within just a few hours, they were able to…
Calculating internal energy and work example | Chemistry | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to do an example problem where we calculate internal energy and also calculate pressure-volume work. So we know the external pressure is 1.01 * 10^5 Pascals, and our system is some balloon. Let’s say it’s a balloon of argon gas.…