Talk:Charles Ponzi

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Mugshot

I think the mugshot is from Ponzi's arrest in Montreal in 1907. It may be from his stint in Alabama. He's too young here for 1920, and Zuckoff's book mentions that the Boston papers published his old Montreal mugshot next to a recent (1920) photo of him with a moustache drawn on for comparison. He definitely didn't have a moustache in the 1920s. If I can prove this I'll amend the caption. -coljac

Cleanup

I just read over the article and it seems to contain a significant amount of biased and uncited statements. Statements such as "This was a fortunate choice.." , and questions such as "why didn't Ponzi take advantage of it himself?", etc don't belong in an encyclopedia. In addition, nothing at all is cited. I'm going to put up the cleanup tag to hopefully get it improved a bit. --Dr. WTF 02:28, 25 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If you do clean this up, could you make it clearer at what point, technically, did Ponzi begin to violate the law? The article states that the arbitrage he claimed he was engaged in was legal. Yet obviously Ponzi was not actually trading in the IRCs. Did he ever? If he did initially, at what point did he stop? There is the implication that Ponzi was paying off new investors with money coming in from the old ones, as with a classic pyramid. But the article does not make this at all clear. If you read the article and did not understand pyramid schemes, it would be confusing as to at what point Ponzi began to violate the law. Please try to make this clearer -- after all, it's the main point of the entire discussion. --Roricka 10:37, 15 December 2008 (ET)

"Fiduciary duty to protect their depositors they were a lasting unindicted beneficiary without direct involvement". What does this mean? It has to be re-written by someone who knows what the original author meant to say.JohnC (talk) 08:00, 19 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Some comments from 2003

This page seems to have some subtle vandalism. Could someone pls check? My monitor is broken and won't display reds, so I can't see what has been altered

Seems to have? Can you be a bit more specific please? Also note the page has not changed for months ... would it really have been left for so long I wonder? Any hints would be v helpful though.

Such as "If the cashflow faltered, the pyramid would collapse and take him to Hell with it.

Whatever."

It's somewhat more colloquial in style than the average article, but I'd hardly call it vandalism.

The page seems to have been vandalized by someone- the Security Exchange Company? Or is that just a coincidence....

I don't know, but I do know you're answering a 3 year old comment :) --kingboyk 13:39, 25 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

TV ADVERTISING TOUTING "THIS WEBSITE"

Bruce Berman, http;//www.296crazyfox.com, and all of the others are a new switch on the pyramid scam. They all tell you "FREE" information about how to get rich quick can be yours. Log on now...

When you do, you find that you have to pay $9.95 for shipping and handling, THEN you have 14 days to look at the information FREE. If you keep it you pay MORE, (typically $39.95) and if not you have to send it back, but forfeit your initial $9.95. These are advertised on otherwise reputable TV, such as Fox, MSNBC, History Channel, Discovery, and most major outlets.

Write to them to complain.

Look at my webpage http://www.otgadventures.com/Links.htm for more of these links.

Citations?

This page seems severely undercited. 156.56.41.63

The citation style I used is pretty legit, I used it on Matsuo Basho's page too. Shii (tock) formerly Ashibaka 21:39, 13 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Article seems more like story

This article seems a lot more like some story meant to entertain rather than a serious means of communicating information. The amount of detail is applauded, but sometimes it seems like there is too much of it; "He slept on the floor of the restaurant as he had no other place to live, but managed to work his way up to the position of waiter," and other such lines. Details like this are 1. extremely specific and therefore susceptible to being incorrect and 2. sounds like the tragic tale of some tramp living a destitute life in the big city, which most of us have probably heard in some version or another. Comments like "Ponzi was unfazed" are grammatically simple and detract from the sense of reading an encyclopedia, and may be better if it was merged with the following sentence; i.e. "Unfazed, Ponzi..."

So, in essence, lines that make the article seem like a story, whether through use of language more suitable in a story (like "There he met an Italian girl, Rose Gnecco, who was swept off her feet by Ponzi's charm." and "Gnecco's love for Ponzi remained unswayed.") or through overly specific detail (like "Charles Morse convinced doctors he was dying by eating soap shavings, and was released early," which has little or no bearing on the rest of the article) should either be removed or merged with other sentences to remove the sense of bias. >>In the time it took you to write that, you could have edited half the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.151.53.222 (talk) 04:34, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting source

The article says this: "On July 26 the [Boston] Post started a series of articles that asked hard questions about the operation of Ponzi's money machine. The Post contacted Clarence Barron, the financial analyst who published the Barron's financial paper, to examine Ponzi's scheme. Barron observed that though Ponzi was offering fantastic returns on investments, Ponzi himself wasn't investing with his own company. Barron then noted that to cover the investments made with the Securities Exchange Company, 160,000,000 postal reply coupons would have to be in circulation. However, only about 27,000 coupons were actually circulating."

The does not seem completely correct if I read this scan of a NY Times article of July 27, 1920. 81.242.188.159 (talk) 10:45, 5 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Not Pyramid Scheme

There is some confusion in here about Ponzi schemes vs. Pyramid schemes. There are differences between them. Basically, a Ponzi scheme pays early investors returns from the investments of later investors. This can work for a time with only moderate growth. A pyramid scheme rewards investors for getting new ones, and for the new ones getting new ones, etc. It needs exponential growth to sustain itself, which is why they collapse so spectacularly.

I've often wondered, where did Charlie Ponzi's money go? They never recovered more than a fraction of it. He never said. Judging from how he lived the rest of his life, HE didn't seem to have it, or to access it at least. Hmm. Good material for a novel or two. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bigmac31 (talk • contribs) 19:14, 17 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Pronunciation

How to you pronounce Ponzi? Does it rhyme with Fonzy? (like of Happy Days?) 68.92.197.157 (talk) 14:25, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yup, that's exactly how it sounds, rhymes with Fonzy. --Chasingsol ^(talk) 21:48, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Huh?

Can someone clear this up: "Charles W. Morse convinced doctors Ponzi was dying by eating soap shavings, and was released early." This makes it seem like Morse at the soap shavings and was released, when it probably intends Ponzi. Not clear what role Morse plays in this. 192.234.99.1 (talk) 17:22, 29 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It was an ironic charge

I don't see the reference actually giving Ponzi a pass on this (Charles_Ponzi#Prison_and_later_life) Yet I find this an interesting thought. It is possible that it was not against the law to do what he did, at the time he did it, except in a broad interpretation of the concept of fraud. In other words, you can postpone executing a business plan, especially when "happily" giving people their money back in the mean time. Failure to generate a return on investment, and taking any amount of money out of a business as salary... these things are not automatically illegal.Carlw4514 (talk) 19:28, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Birthplace?

Where was Ponzi born? Lugo Italy, or Palma Italy? Wm (talk) 18:39, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Photo altered?

The photo used in the opening paragraph File:21rampell.xlarge1.jpg appears to be a composite of a background and a body with the superimposition of another person's head. This photo did appear at a New York Times on-line edition article [1] as per the photo file credits, but it appears to be a jpg manipulation. Look at the lighting on the clothes and hands and compare it to the lighting on the face. What do others think?--TGC55 (talk) 16:02, 26 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

     Agreed. From the viewer's POV, the lighting of his face appears to be coming from the left and slightly above, whereas the shadows cast by his hands and the sheets of paper tucked into the corner of the desk set, as well as the bright reflection on the wing of his left collar, clearly show there is a bright source of illumination from the right and above. The discrepancy between the lighting of the right side of his face (as perceived by the viewer) and the adjacent collar on the same side is particularly glaring; I don't think it can be explained away even if we assume two separate lighting sources.

     In addition, it seems to me that the head is circa 15% wider and taller compared to the body than would be the case in a person of normal proportions.

68.102.53.29 (talk) 03:35, 27 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]