William Goldman, Charles Ponzi, and incense sticks -

William Goldman, Charles Ponzi, and incense sticks

Corbett | December 18, 2008 6:19 AM

I crashed early last night since my brain essentially turned off from all the various things I'm working on. The down side of that is I woke up at 3am ready to start the day. So I started catching up on those untended tasks, recoding all of my wife's site, converting Big5 over to UTF-8, reparsing content, researching some new projects, and catching up on the latest never ending bad news.

Besides the dollar flaming out, NYC cops knocking people off of bikes, and A-Bian nonsense, I tried to catch up on Bernard Madoff and his 50 billion dollar Ponzi scheme. It makes you think how many more of these guys will start to tumble as their money gets called in. One European fund manager I know is waiting to go to jail in HK for bilking his friends and investors out of 40 million Euros from his private fund.

My friend Paul Denlinger wrote an interesting post called "The Elephant in the Room" on his site, China Vortex, saying pretty much that the whole growth driven US financial market was just another kind of Ponzi scheme. I have to agree with him on that one. It reminds me of some sage wisdom my grandfather shared with me when I was 11, "You can't always trust the bank, son." He lived through the Great Depression and as such it became a large part of my own upbringing. Here's some other things he taught me as well.

I also found this piece from the LA Times particularly enlightening: "Madoff's fund purportedly relied on a complex trading strategy, executed according to a supposedly proprietary algorithm. The truth about Wall Street, however, isn't that dissimilar from what writer William Goldman once said about Hollywood -- when it comes to what works or doesn't work, nobody knows anything. When it comes to finance and investing, nobody is that much smarter than all the other smart guys."

This struck me as particularly funny because just the other night I was out with some friends, and one of them runs a hedge find investing into China. He said, "You know, those guys who poke three incense sticks into the alter and pray to the money gods know as much or more about investing than I do."

Category: Ramble

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3q2u is written by Corbett Wall, and is really just a window into my quirky little world. It's also a way for me to exercise my thoughts and make random comments outside of cultural, language, or business barriers.

3q2u is an acronym which if said in Chinese and Japanese sounds like "Thank you to you!" Dumb but easy to remember. More >>