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
Digital SAT Prep for School Districts - Khan Academy Districts
Hello and welcome to driving digital SAT success with Khan Academy! As teachers and students are navigating through the new digital SAT assessment this spring, we know how important it is to ensure your students are ready for the big day. My name is Eliza…
Frank Drake’s Cosmic Road Map | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic
It’s Halloween 1961. Ten of the world’s leading scientists have found their way to a remote spot in the Allegheny Mountains. They’re there in secret to talk about searching for aliens. Okay, hang on, this isn’t the beginning of a Twilight Zone episode. Th…
Contaminate | Vocabulary | Khan Academy
Careful wordsmiths, mind where you step. This word’s been contaminated. Yes, contaminate! It’s a verb; it means to make something dirty or unsafe. You can think of it as another word for “pollute,” but it can also mean something’s been added that shouldn’…
Deriving formula for centripetal acceleration from angular velocity | AP Physics 1 | Khan Academy
[Instructor] In multiple videos we have already talked about if something is moving in a circular motion at a fixed speed, its velocity is constantly changing. Why is that? Because velocity is a vector, and a vector has not just a magnitude, which would…
How Surfing Lead One NatGeo Explorer to The Depths of The Ocean | National Geographic
My first experience with the ocean started out as a surfer. I just loved being in the water. I loved riding waves, I loved the energy of the ocean, and there was no cost to entry to surfing. You know, once I had a surfboard, I could just ride waves all da…
National savings and investment | Financial sector | AP Macroeconomics | Khan Academy
In this video, we are going to use the GDP equation that we have seen before to think about how national savings relates to investment. Really, it’s a way to algebraically manipulate things to ensure that it fits with our intuition. So another way to thin…