Mini-Madoff scheme

[Benjamin Zimmer]

"Mini-Madoff" also made this list of "recession-ese" from ABC News...

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/story?id=7027138


On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Victor <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I thought I posted this to the list, but it seems to have been a closed
> reply.
>
> ==
>
> I've noticed that the "mini-Madoff" expression has become popular when a
> number of relatively smaller  (in the millions up to single-digit
> billions of dollars) swindlers popped up all at the same time. I am not
> sure if NYT coined the term or if it was in circulation shortly prior to
> that, but here's the NYT headline from January 27/28, 2009
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/business/28ponzi.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
> Troubled Times Bring Mini-Madoffs to Light
>
> I just checked a couple of blogs that routinely use the phrase now and
> the first occurrence on each of them is also on January 28, so it traces
> back to the NYT headline. The schemes that I have seen referred to as
> "mini-Madoffs" have ranged from $150G to $8B, the latter being Allen
> Stanford. Now that the Madoff figure has shrunk by more than half, there
> does not seem to be anything "mini" about Stanford. I am sure there are
> a lot of smaller scheme covered as well, with "mini-Madoff" effectively
> replacing "Ponzi" as the generic investment swindle. Note that "Ponzi
> scheme" has been widely used in reference to schemes that would not have
> technically qualified as Ponzi schemes, so switching to "mini-Madoff
> scheme" is not much of a stretch.
>
>    VS-)
>
>
> James A. Landau <JJJRLandau at netscape.com> wrote:
> > A couple of comments:
> >
> > - "mini-Madoff scheme" implies that there is the term "Madoff scheme", but how a Madoff scheme differs from any other Ponzi scheme is not known.
> >
> > - How large was Madoff's scheme?  Most news articles say "$50 billion" but that figure was given by Madoff, who by now has been proven to be a liar.  Recent estimates are that Madoff took in somewhere between $10 and $20 billion.  How then would you classify the fraud at the Stanford financial operations, which seems to have been 8 billion dollars?  It is "mini" compared to $50G, but is it "mini" compared to $10G-$20G?
> >
> > - Whatever that $1G scheme that Markopolos described was, it has not yet been identified in the news.
> >
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org