John,
That's very interesting. I will later check out your letters. Thanks.
Kaushik
Sent from my iPad
I read your article "The Ponzi Economy" in the Scientific American with great interest and I feel that it does a fine job of explaining how Ponzi schemes operate and how they are sometimes difficult to detect. It is also often difficult to convince the victims that they are in fact victims of such schemes.
While I agree with you that the Madoff scheme was a huge Ponzi scheme it is in my mind dwarfed by what I call USAPonzi "The Biggest Ponzi Scheme on the Planet". The U.S. Government, by not taxing the U.S. citizenry sufficiently to finance their future social benefit commitments, has created a Ponzi liability that is by my calculation now on the order of $95 Trillion or over one thousand times larger than the Madoff Ponzi or the Enron Fraud. I also calculate that this scheme is currently dropping $6.4 Trillion a year ($535B a month and $17.6B a day) of phantom money into the U.S. and global economy.
As a result every business in the U.S. (and to some extent every business in the world) is surfing on USAPonzi and as a result essentially every business is a Ponzi scheme by induction.
This scheme has caused asset price inflation of about 5% per year since FY1969 when USAPonzi was launched by LBJ with the Unified Budget and the continued use of Cash Accounting. This asset price inflation now makes the rich people feel that they are about 7 times as wealthy as they really would be if the Government was properly funding these future liabilities.
I have created a website that analyzes this Ponzi Scheme (www.usaponzi.com) and predicts what will happen when USAPonzi implodes.
As you will see I have submitted several letters to the Securities and Exchange Commission as a "Whistlerblower" noting this use of a corrupt and fraudulent accounting methodology by the U.S. Government.
I would encourage you to read my fifth letter (April 14, 2014) to the SEC as I feel that it best explains in a relatively short document why this Ponzi scheme should be exposed and corrected.
Again thanks for publishing this fine article on "The Ponzi Economy".
John W White