The Fraudster's Guide to Magic Money
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 April 2024
⏱️ 68 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Sam Israel had a problem. The investors in his hedge fund, Bayou Capital, were expecting spectacular returns. Sam himself had spent years proclaiming the fund's brilliant results. But in reality, Sam had been marking his own homework, publishing fraudulent accounts and using these to lure in new investors.Â
What to do? Well, the logical thing of course: wait around for an extraordinary profitable streak, and in the meantime keep up the ruse...
This episode of Cautionary Tales was recorded live at the Bristol Festival of Economics and studies three incredible investment scams. How do pyramid and ponzi schemes snowball out of control, flattening victim and fraudster alike?
For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:09.0 | In the 90s, New York Detective Louis Garcelllla locked up the worst criminals. |
| 0:13.7 | Putting bad guys away. |
| 0:15.4 | There's no feeling like it. |
| 0:16.9 | Then jailhouse lawyers took game led by Derek Hamilton. |
| 0:20.5 | Scracella took me to the precinct and alive. |
| 0:23.4 | Twenty men eventually walked free. |
| 0:25.8 | Now, in the Burden Podcast, after a decade of silence, Louis Scarsella finally tells his story story and so does Derek Hamilton. |
| 0:34.0 | Listen to the burden on the I-Heart radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your |
| 0:38.6 | podcasts. I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4 this is history's secret heroes. |
| 0:45.7 | A new series of rarely heard tales from World War II. |
| 0:49.5 | They had no idea that she was Britain's top female code breaker. |
| 0:53.2 | We'll hear of daring risk takers. |
| 0:55.8 | What she was offering to do was to ski in over the high Carpathian mountains. |
| 1:01.0 | Of course it was dangerous, but danger was his friend. |
| 1:05.0 | Subscribe to history secret heroes wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 1:10.0 | Hello dear listener Tim Harford here. I have some very exciting news to share with you. |
| 1:16.0 | On the evening of Tuesday the 21st of May I will be bringing a special live edition of |
| 1:25.4 | cautionary tales to the stage in London. There will be music, there will be |
| 1:30.9 | actors. |
| 1:31.9 | Hello! And there will be actors. Hello. |
| 1:33.0 | And there will be plenty of hair raising, spine, tingling, twists and turns. |
... |
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