Most Recent Ponzi Schemes

Harvard Still Denies Madoff Course as Professor Reaches Out

Bernie Madoff’s obsession with the Harvard Business School continues with the accused swindler writing the FOX Business Network last week to once again protest our coverage of the school’s denial of his claim that it is “building an entrepreneur course” based on his pre-Ponzi scheme days as a trader on Wall Street .

So we checked with Harvard once again, and Harvard came back with much the same answer.

“There are no official discussions of any kind about developing a course with him,” a spokesman for the business school tells FOX Business.

So what is Madoff talking about? As we reported Madoff, boasted in a series of emails with FOX Business about this entrepreneurial course that will focus not on the scam that made him infamous, but on his days as one of the pioneers creating the electronic market-making of stocks, where computers rather than traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, matched buy and sell orders. Madoff would later become chairman of the largest electronic exchange, the Nasdaq stock market, which this alleged course would also focus on.

“I have been approached by number of other business schools but have only committed to Harvard,” he wrote me in mid July adding: “I have an interview that is ahead with the Harvard Business School. I will keep you posted. Some strange turn of events, HUH!”

When I reported the school’s blanket denial, among other questionable statements he made in a series of emails to me, Madoff followed up by calling me a “hatchet man.” Then in an email he sent from prison last Thursday, Madoff again spoke about a “Harvard Business School's professor's course project with” him.

But like most things involving the world’s most notorious white-collar criminal, his involvement with the Harvard Business School contains an element of truth, though if you believe officials at Harvard in their latest set of denials, Madoff’s statements are a gross exaggeration.

JEFF JACOBY: A PONZI SCHEME….THAT'S NOT THE POINT ...

That “rough balance” be maintained? When Social Security began, there were dozens of workers paying taxes into the system for every retiree who was taking benefits out of it. By 1950, the ratio had slipped to 16.5-to-1. Now it is a little less than 3-to-1 , and continuing to shrink. When the last of the baby boomers retire, there will be just two working taxpayers for every beneficiary. In the face of such a demographic tide, isn’t Social Security ultimately as doomed as any pyramid scheme?

And yet whole furor over Social Security’s “Ponzi-ness” has mostly served as a giant distraction. Back and forth the arguments go — one side notes with alarm the exploding number of retirees, while the other side says Social Security taxes and benefits can always be adjusted. One side warns that Social Security’s future unfunded liabilities already amount to a staggering $20 trillion; the other side points to its huge current surpluses .

But fighting over an analogy gives both sides too easy an out. What Americans should really be wrestling with is not whether Social Security is or isn’t a Ponzi scheme, but whether its all-important surpluses are wisely invested. Or whether, to be precise, they are invested at all.

Next: Uncle Sam’s IOUs

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.