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
Timur | 600 - 1450 Regional and interregional interactions | World History | Khan Academy
Where we left off in the last few videos, we saw the Empire of the Mongols fragment into the various Khanates. In the East, you have the Yuan Dynasty established by Kublai Khan, and then in the West, you have the Golden Horde, the Chagatai Khanate, and th…
Tracing program execution | Intro to CS - Python | Khan Academy
Let’s trace a program step by step. This is a common pattern we’ll use to understand what the computer is doing under the hood when we press the Run button. Tracing program execution like this helps us better read and write programs because we can start t…
Later stages of the Civil War part 2
All right, so we’ve been talking about the later stages of the Civil War. In the last video, we just did a brief overview of the end of 1863, after the North has won the Battle of Gettysburg and Lee has been turned around and sent back down to Richmond, w…
Confidence intervals and margin of error | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
It is election season, and there is a runoff between Candidate A versus Candidate B. We are pollsters, and we’re interested in figuring out, well, what’s the likelihood that Candidate A wins this election? Well, ideally, we would go to the entire populati…
Optimal decision-making and opportunity costs | AP(R) Microeconomics | Khan Academy
What we’re going to do in this video is think about optimal decision making by rational agents. It’s just thinking about how would a logical someone with a lot of reasoning ability make optimal decisions and make the best decisions for themselves. Well, t…
Associative property of multiplication
[Instructor] So, what we’re gonna do is get a little bit of practicing multiple numbers together, and we’re gonna discover some things. So, first I want you to figure out what four times five times two is. Pause the video and try to figure it out on you…