Beating the System

Ponzi schemes don’t discriminate between the rich and the poor because they are equally greedy.  

That Albanian investors could lose more than a billion euro in pyramid-style schemes more than a decade ago, bringing the country to the brink of collapse, was deemed the normal state of affairs for a country that had just emerged from one of the world’s most brutal Stalinist regimes.

Pyramid schemes, which get their name “Ponzi” from an Italian, Charles Ponzi, who engineered a particularly notorious one nearly a century ago, are nothing new; they have probably always existed and always will.  
 
The average Albanian at the time was not familiar with annuities, bonds, yields or anything else that economists deemed the essence of financial markets. Why work, people thought, when you can get a lavish return from sitting at home?
 
In the end, doesn’t the system teach us to get rich in any way and by any means possible within the law? Wealth has become the existential reason of the world we live in; even communist China preaches it to its citizens today. It has become the ultimate measure of our souls, brains, virility and god knows what else. 
 
However, that some of the world’s “savviest” investors could fall for the scheme – including a score of banks that are supposed to be institutions of trust – is troubling. It is troubling in the sense one doesn’t expect the collective IQ of bankers in Britain or Spain to be equal only to that of the average malnourished Albanian villager in 1994 who had just seen a colour television for the first time and who was probably still cherishing empty coke cans as modern art sculptures. No offence to Andy Warhol!
 
I am not trying to come up with an equation regarding people’s intelligence. The thing is that the problem, both in the Albanian pyramid scandal and in the Ponzi-style hedge funds system of Wall Street banker Bernard Madoff, who managed to swindle some 50 billion euro from his investors, is ingrained in the belief system.
 
If, in the Albania of more than a decade ago, people believed that the likes of VEFA holding or Sudja Inc and others were redistributing the riches of the communist leaders stashed away in Swiss bank accounts, or were selling arms and drugs and somehow needed to launder their money in a Robin Hood-like manner, Madoff’s investors were duped by his apparent insider knowledge of the markets.
 
That in both cases the main proposition stems from an idea that someone engages in what is illegal and plainly said to be wrong for worthy reasons; to redistribute wealth or even better, to create it.      
 
In both cases, those who were swindled out of their savings believed they were beating the system, a system where all ends in life, have both as cause and effect, wealth. 
 
Unfortunately such a route leads to a dead end, so it’s about time people started to question their belief systems, because one thing for certain, their souls now are poorer and their pockets lighter.