History of Greed : Financial Fraud from Tulip Mania to Bernie Madoff

by David E. Y. Sarna; Foreword by: Andrew Malik

• ISBN13: 9780470877425
• ISBN10: 0470877421
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2010-07-01
• Publisher: Wiley

Summary

Praise for HISTORY OF GREED"David Sarna is a visionary technologist. He is also a sophisticated investor and financier. He has written a readable, comprehensive, fascinating, and well-researched book that explores troublesome aspects of the financial system in a way only an experienced insider could." -Jay N. Goldberg, Senior Managing Director, Hudson Ventures"A comprehensive review of what has happened to us in our financial markets over and over and over and over again. It's an important history, written with wit and delivered with wisdom. Undoubtedly, History of Greed will become required reading for anyone serious about understanding the capital markets." -Frederick L. Gorsetman, Founder and Managing Member, Oxbridge Financial Group, LLC400 years of financial fraud in the makingFrom the earliest financial scams of the seventeenth century, through the headline-grabbing Wall Street scandals of our times, History of Greed provides a comprehensive history of financial fraud. In it, David E. Y. Sarna exposes the true and often riveting stories of how both naïve and sophisticated investors alike were fooled by unscrupulous entrepreneurs, lawyers, hedge fund managers, CPAs, Texas billionaires, political fundraisers, music managers, financial advisers, and even former Mossad agents. From the people behind the financial fraud and how they did it to why people continually fall prey to scam artists, Sarna outlines what actions you can take today to protect yourself from becoming the victim of tomorrow's "too good to be true" investment opportunity. History of Greed details how markets are manipulated, books are cooked, Ponzi schemes are hatched, and how the government only closes the barn door once the cows have all escaped.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Selling Air

Why Now?

Crash Postmortem

How Greed, Hubris, and Lack of Supervision Did Investors In

Why We Do It

Bubbles and Fraud

Securities Fraud

Its Long and Storied Past

The Perils of Greed

It's All for the Easy Money

The Elements of Financial Fraud

A Case Study with "Crazy Eddie" Antar

"Other People's Money"

The O.P.M. Leasing Fraud

Smaller-Company Fraud

The "ISC" Story

Selling Long and Short

But Mostly Short

Market Manipulation

Improper Short Selling and Other Abuses

PIPEs

Investing Unfairly

Promotion Fraud

Pump and Dump

Leaks, Front-Running, and Insider Trading

Test Yourself

Fictitious Volume

A Pump-and-Dump Scam with Intrigue

Parachute into Prison

U.S. v. Schrenker

Affi nity Group Fraud

Scamming Your Own Community

Twentieth-Century Ponzi Schemes

Larger and Longer-Lasting Scams

Hit Charade

Lou Pearlman

Hedge Fund Ponzi Fraud

Hedge Funds Are for Big Boys

Madoff and the World's Largest Ponzi Scheme

The Mother of All Ponzi Schemes

How Madoff Got Away with It

Who Helped Plot in the Mother of All Ponzi Schemes; Who Can Be Made to Pay?

Madoff Plea and Its Aftermath

Governments Go after Merkin, Kohn, and Maybe Others in the Mother of All Ponzi Schemes

Mopping up after Madoff

Lawyers Feast on Madoff Feeders in the Mother of All Ponzi Schemes

Other Recent Ponzi Schemes

Madoff was a Crook but He Had No Monopoly on Recent Ponzi Schemes

Stanford Group

Massive $7 Billion, Multinational Fraud Comes to Light

Ultimate Chutzpah

The Strange Tale of Marc Dreier, Esq

Detecting Fraudulent Financial Schemes

How Much to Regulate? How Much to Verify?

Fraudulent Offerings

A Short Look

Auction-Rate Securities

A $330 Billion Fraud?

$132 Million Tax-Free Exchange Fraud

Section 1031

Not Smart

The Smart Online Trading Scam

Boiler Rooms

Where the Heat Rises

Accounting Frauds

With Examples

Stock Option Frauds

Alchemy That Benefi ts Insiders

Odd and Unusual Financial Frauds

Not Your Everyday Fraud

Afterword: What Does the Future Hold?

Notes

About the Author

Further reading

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.