“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” – H.L. Mencken

The same week that the world made Elon Musk its first trillionaire, The Wall Street Journal published a devastating review of one of the most celebrated anti-poverty ideas of the past half-century.

The Davos class has been touting “microfinance” for decades as a sure-fire solution to alleviating global poverty. “Doing well by doing good,” they called it.

The economist who launched the concept won a Nobel Prize. Politicians and philanthropists swarmed. And then even Wall Street got involved, turning it into a more of a “do-well” than a “do-good” enterprise.

As it turns out, giving tiny loans to the world’s most despairing people too often leads to new loans to repay the old loans, and a cascading cycle of debt, according to a slew of academic studies.

It also leads to homelessness, child labor, suicides and shakedowns from aggressive loan officers, the Journal reports. Amid intense desperation, many borrowers end up spending the money on medical expenses and other necessities instead of small businesses. Go figure.

We can’t all be wealthy, but poverty activists tell us there is enough food, water, technology and productive capacity on this planet to meet the basic life needs of everybody. The failure is not so much scarcity. It is distribution, governance, war, corruption, political will, infrastructure and power.

But the super rich and the super poor just talk past each other. The super rich are obviously more intent on getting super richer. And the super poor just want to survive a life most of us would find unimaginable.

In 2021, World Food Programme chief David Beasley suggested that just a small percentage of the wealth of the world’s richest people could end world hunger.

This was back in the day when Elon Musk was a mere multibillionaire, and he must have taken umbrage.

He got on Twitter and made the unsolicited boast that if the WFP could explain how $6 billion of his wealth would end world hunger, he would sell enough of his Tesla stock to do it.

WFP came back with a detailed plan, but it was not actually a plan to “end world hunger.” It was to provide emergency assistance that could help about 42 million people facing famine conditions in 43 countries for about a year.

Nope. Not quite enough there. The conversation fizzled out like a microfinanced business plan.

So now Musk is a trillionaire thanks to the biggest initial public stock offering in history at SpaceX. And the world’s poorest people are still starving.

What about Sam’s hunger?

Forget about ending world hunger. What about poor Sam-Bankman-Fried?

One of the first complaints the convicted crypto-klepto had about prison life was the food. The vegetarian complained that he was surviving largely on beans and rice from the commissary because he found prison meals unsuitable.

Read More: Sam In The Slam (Business Blunders)

The FTX founder once had access to private chefs and billions of dollars in misappropriated customer funds. He must be starving.

This week, he lost his latest appeal of his fraud conviction, leaving him with fewer options than a federal prison food tray.

Still on the front end of a 25-year sentence for one of the largest financial frauds in American history, Bankman-Fried’s last remaining hope may be a pardon from President Donald Trump.

Despite all the loot he gave to Democrats when he was at the top of his game, he’s been sucking up to Trump for more than a year.

He must really be famished. Can someone please send him a care package? Or how about just a microloan for the commissary?

Stanford > Apple > Crypto > Prison

You’ve got to love today’s over-achievers.

Read More On Do Kwon:

• Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word (Business Blunders)

• Kwon Don’t (Business Blunders)

Because it just keeps happening

Business Blunders always tries to put the present in context with a pithy quote from the past.

It’s all been said before, but too few of us remember the past. That’s why the same blunders repeat and rhyme with history.

This week, I’ve published a grand curation of the greatest observations anyone has ever made business, leadership, management investing, economics, fraud, failure, corporate folly and more.

Read More: Timeless Wisdom Too Often Ignored (Business Blunders)

Have a read. Fill your soul with pithy wisdom. And if you have a favorite line that’s not in the collection, please add it to the comments.

Leave a comment

Don’t Miss These Blunders:

• A Billion-Dollar Fashion Startup Laid Bare: CaaStle’s fraud is what happens when a company has too few checks, too few balances, and too many empty board seats

• Bill Gates Is No Mr. Rogers The billionaire philanthropist can’t dress up a bad association. He is now hopelessly tied to the Epstein class.

• The Religion Of Money Paul Vigna, author of ‘The Almightier,’ joins me in a livestream video to talk about a world where everything revolves around money

• Trash It, Crash It, Cash It The financial world needs honest short sellers. Prosecutors convinced a jury that Andrew Left at Citron Research wasn’t one of them.

• Cut Staff, Get Money UnitedHealthcare’s business model draws more scrutiny. Massachusetts’ Attorney General says it overcharged the state by more than $100 million.

• Suited And Booted BP has cycled through blundering executives for decades from John Browne’s scandalous courtroom lie to Albert Manifold’s alleged bullying

• When Schlitz Went To Schitz The beer that made Milwaukee famous never recovered from its cost-cutting moves in the 1970s.

• Amazon’s Philosopher King Jeff Bezos is just another bloviating billionaire talking his book on CNBC. Taxes are still coming out of your check.

• Cruci-fried Chicken Has Chick-fil-A been closing on the wrong day for the Sabbath? A federal lawsuit is putting a Texas franchisee of this famously pious chicken chain on the grill.

• The Patriot Economy: Trump, Jesus, Liberty – Ponzi – Edwin Brant Frost IV pleads guilty to a $140 million scheme he peddled on conservative media

• Illegal Eagles – Elite corporate lawyers allegedly formed an insider trading ring and “made out like bandits” with clients’ confidential information

• The White-Collar Playbook – The most common types of financial fraud and the companies that didn’t get away with them

• NACHO NACHO Man Wall Street bets Strait of Hormuz stays closed and gasoline prices will sting all summer long

• Full Court Heist Atlanta Hawks senior finance executive Lester T. Jones Jr. is headed to prison after looting his team

• Red Flag Alerts Meets Business Blunders What could go wrong? Everything! And we’ve seen it all before. Watch Herb Greenberg and Al Lewis compare notes on the Golden Age Of Grift.

• This Day In Blunders: About The Series Explore the history of business faux pas, failures and frauds in this day-by-day calendar of calamities

• It Takes Moxie To Push Oxy A pharmacist goes to prison. Purdue Pharma settles. The Sacklers walk.

• Tricolor Me Blue JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Fifth Third Bank can’t escape the obvious conclusions as they defend themselves in a subprime auto lending debacle

• Sand Trap Saudi Arabia launched LIV Golf in a hostile takeover of the sport. Now it looks like the oil-rich nation can’t afford to stay on course.

• Don’t Gloat About Your Moat A common turn of phrase helped prosecutors win an antitrust ruling against Live Nation. Could its concert monopoly finally be over?

• The Substack Ponzi Tyler Bossetti built a huge social media following. His secret: 30% investment returns.

• A Friend Of A Friend Of Epstein Warren Buffett gave Bill Gates’ foundation $43 billion. Now he doesn’t even talk to the guy.

What if an executive is not right in the head and no one takes charge of the situation before it runs off the rails?

Venture capital and private equity giants dumped hundreds of millions into CaaStle, a fashion technology startup that promised big profits from “clothing as a service.” They didn’t bother to install a sufficient board of directors.

There were only two, maybe three, depending on who admits that they were on the board at a given time. There was no obvious governance plan. No audit committee. No independent investigative committee.

Just the founder, Christine Hunsicker, 48, fudging the numbers and running wild with other people’s money.

Hunsicker has pleaded guilty to a $283 million fraud. Her company, formerly called Gwynnie Bee, is in bankruptcy. And and the bankruptcy trustee is trying to claw back as much as possible on behalf of some really big, stupid money.

Read More On Hunsicker: The Empress’s New Clothes (Business Blunders)

When she confessed to her board of directors, do you know what they did? Next to nothing.

They even let her stay on as CEO and didn’t disclose their financial disaster to their investors for three months, according to a deep dive in Sunday’s New York Times.

Nobody forced her to resign. Nobody disclosed the folly to investors. Nothing much happened until criminal investigators took an interest, according to lawsuits filed by the bankruptcy trustee and the investors.

At its peak, CaaStle claimed a $1.25 billion valuation and it raised more than $600 million from a who’s who of finance and technology.

Hunsicker claimed to have raised money from Bill Ackman at Pershing Square, Jim Breyer of Breyer Capital, Peter Fenton of Benchmark, Henry Kravis at KKR, Peter Thiel of Founders Fund, and even Alphabet chairman and former Stanford University president John Hennessy, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Other reports list former Amazon executive Ram Shriram of Serpalo Ventures, investment banker Kamal Tayara of KCP Capital, and Geoff Schneider of Cava Capital, who once promised that Hunsicker’s company was “setting the stage for a new relationship between people and their clothes.”

These are not amateurs gambling on some wannabe tech bro’s app idea. They manage billions of dollars. They conduct due diligence. They negotiate shareholder rights. They demand board seats. They hire lawyers. They build audit committees.

What were they doing while they were being robbed?

Then, to cap it all off, after finally dumping Hunsicker, the company put her co-founder on the board, effectively swapping one insider for another – like that was going to help.

Hunsicker faces up to 20 years in prison when she is sentenced on Aug. 5. Her attorney plans to push for a lighter punishment, The New York Times reported.

Part of the argument for leniency may include a brain injury Hunsicker reportedly sustained in 2017 when a heavy mirror fell from her bathroom wall.

Zero checks and balances on the board. Zero checks and balances on the bathroom wall. Zero checks on the leader’s malfunctioning head.

Sounds more like Washington D.C. than New York City.

Read more

When it comes to how to properly conduct yourself in business, there is truly nothing new under the sun.

From ancient philosophers to celebrity CEOs, humanity’s greatest minds have pretty much paved the road to a successful life. The trouble is that busy people get so caught up in their ambitions, they ignore this timeless wisdom and curry folly.

A tip from the past almost always seems to put the present into a clearer context. That’s why I am always looking for the best quotes for Business Blunders.

Here’s a curation of the greatest observations anyone has ever made business, leadership, management investing, economics, fraud, failure, corporate folly and more.

Have a read. Fill your soul with pithy wisdom. And if you have a favorite line that’s not in the collection, please add it to the comments.

Leave a comment

The Best Quotes On Fraud

Warren Buffett:

“You can’t make a good deal with a bad person.”

Andy Griffith:

“Who is going to believe a con artist? Everyone, if she’s good.”

Richard Petty:

“If you ain’t trying to cheat a little, you ain’t likely to win much.”

Friedrich Nietzsche:

“If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.”

Honoré de Balzac:

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”

“How fondly swindlers coddle their dupes!”

William Shakespeare:

“False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”

Sophocles:

“Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.”

W.C. Fields:

“It’s morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money.”

Willie Sutton:

“I rob banks because that’s where the money is.”

Homer Simpson:

“It takes two to lie: one to lie and one to listen.”

Aesop:

“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”

Edward Coke:

“Fraud and deceit abound in these days more than in former times.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

“If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.”

The Best Quotes On Corruption

John Steinbeck:

“On all levels American society is rigged.”

Ralph Nader:

“The corporate crime wave has a new accomplice: The federal government.”

Alan Greenspan:

“Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. … What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum.”

Frédéric Bastiat:

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

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Abraham Lincoln:

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

Pope Francis:

“Corruption is paid for by the poor.”

Edward R. Murrow:

“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”

Jonathan Swift:

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.”

Bess Myerson:

“The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.”

Adam Smith:

“Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”

Chuck Grassley:

“Going after waste, fraud, and abuse without whistleblowers is about as useful as harvesting acres of corn with a pair of rusty old scissors.”

Oscar Ameringer:

“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich.”

P.J. O’Rourke:

– “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”

David Hume:

“The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.”

John Locke:

“Who lies for you will lie against you.”

The Best Quotes With Bad Predictions

Darryl Zanuck:

“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures.”

Dick Rowe:

“Guitar groups are on the way out.”

Robert Metcalfe:

“I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.”

Paul Krugman:

“By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machines.”

Ken Olsen:

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”

Irving Fisher:

“Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”

The Best Quotes Containing Blunders

Jeff Bezos:

“I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all this.”

Stockton Rush:

“You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed.”

Jeffrey Skilling:

“Well, thank you very much. We appreciate it … asshole.”

Dennis Kozlowski:

“I never thought that what I was doing was wrong.”

Lloyd Blankfein:

Just banker “doing God’s work.”

Adam Neumann:

“We are here to elevate the world’s consciousness.”

Alan Greenspan:

“I made a mistake.”

Elon Musk:

“Don’t advertise. … If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. … Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”

Ken Fisher:

“Money, sex, those are the two most private things for most people. … It’s like … going up to a woman in a bar and saying, hey I want to talk about what’s in your pants.”

Frank Abagnale

“Dear dad, you always told me that an honest man has nothing to fear, so I’m trying my best not to be afraid.”

The Best Quotes On Investing

Bernard Baruch:

“The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as many men as possible.”

Jason Zweig:

“I put two children through Harvard by trading options. Unfortunately, they were my broker’s children.”

John C. Bogle:

“The stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.”

“Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.”

“If you have trouble imagining a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn’t be in stocks.”

Jay Leno:

“The United States has developed a new weapon that destroys people but leaves buildings standing. It’s called the stock market.”

Mark Twain:

“October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.”

Eugene Fama:

“I’d compare stock pickers to astrologers, but I don’t want to bad mouth astrologers.”

Jesse Livermore:

“The stock market is never obvious. It is designed to fool most of the people most of the time.”

Nick Murray:

“There is no such thing as no-risk. There’s only a choice of what to risk, and when to risk it.”

Peter Bernstein:

“The market’s not a very accommodating machine; it won’t provide high returns just because you need them.”

Benjamin Graham:

“The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism and unjustified pessimism.”

Jeremy Siegel:

“Fear has a greater grasp on human action than does the impressive weight of historical evidence.”

Charlie Munger:

“The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting.”

Isaac Newton:

“I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”

George Goodman:

“If you don’t know who you are, the stock market is an expensive place to find out.”

Peter Lynch:

“Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.”

“Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections than in corrections themselves.”

Charles Dow:

“There is always a disposition in people’s minds to think that existing conditions will be permanent.”

Warren Buffett:

“Wall Street is the only place that people ride in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.”

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”

William Feather:

“One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.”

John Maynard Keynes:

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

“There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.”

John Templeton:

“Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.”

Benjamin Graham:

“The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.”

Philip Fisher:

“I want companies that welcome dissent, rather than stifle it, that don’t penalize people who criticize what management is doing.”

Howard Marks:

“Never confuse brains with a bull market.”

Jesse Livermore:

“The market is never wrong – opinions often are.”

Howard Marks:

“Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.”

The Best Quotes On Economics

Adam Smith

“All money is a matter of belief.”

George Bernard Shaw:

“If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.”

Laurence J. Peter:

“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.”

Paul Samuelson:

“Economists have predicted nine out of the last five recessions.”

John Kenneth Galbraith:

“Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.”

Marty Allen:

“The study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything is last year.”

Alfred A. Knopf:

“An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.”

John Kenneth Galbraith:

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

J. Frank Dobie:

“The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.”

Ernest Hemingway:

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war.”

Milton Friedman:

“Inflation is taxation without legislation.”

Sherlock Holmes:

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”

Edgar Fiedler:

“The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.”

Alfred North Whitehead:

“Civilizations advance by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking.”

John Kenneth Galbraith:

“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”

Charlie Munger:

“The world is not driven by greed. It’s driven by envy.”

Bob Farrell:

“When all the experts agree, something else is going to happen.”

Humphrey B. Neill:

“When everybody thinks alike, everyone is likely to be wrong.”

Martin Luther King Jr.:

“Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level.”

Oscar Wilde:

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

The Best Quotes On Integrity

William Shakespeare:

“No legacy is so rich as honesty.”

Marcus Aurelis:

“Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.”

Oprah Winfrey:

“Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower:

“The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible.”

Bob Marley:

“The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively.”

Mary Kay Ash:

“Honesty is the cornerstone of all success. Without honesty, confidence and ability to perform shall cease to exist.”

Elbert Hubbard:

“Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.”

Geoffrey Chaucer:

“The guilty think all talk is of themselves.”

Tom Peters:

“There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity.”

Thomas Paine:

“Character is much easier kept than recovered.”

Baltasar Gracián:

“One lie destroys a whole reputation of integrity.”

Samuel Johnson:

“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”

Warren Buffett:

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

Martin Luther King Jr.:

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

Henry Ford:

“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”

Frederick Douglass:

“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”

Nikki Giovanni:

“If now isn’t a good time for the truth, I don’t see when we’ll get to it.”

Martin Luther King:

“The time is always right to do what is right.”

Roberto Clemente:

“If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don’t do that, you are wasting your time on this earth.”

Harry S. Truman:

“The buck stops here.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt:

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Aristotle:

“Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.”

Jane Addams:

“Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.”

Fred Rogers:

“Little by little we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we are not perfect. ”

The Best Quotes On Failure

Steven Wright:

“If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.”

Bill Gates:

“It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”

Warren Buffett:

“It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.”

Carl Sagan:

“Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money”

Herman Melville:

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”

John Burroughs:

“A man may fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”

George Washington Carver:

“Ninety–nine percent of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.”

Henry Ford:

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”

Sara Blakely:

“Failure is not trying.”

Nelson Mandela:

“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

Epictetus:

“It is not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”

Arianna Huffington:

“We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes.”

Thomas Watson:

“The way to succeed is to double your error rate.”

John Kenneth Galbraith:

“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.”

Fred Allen:

“A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.”

The Best Quotes On Success

William Pollard:

“The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”

John F. Kennedy:

“Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”

Henry David Thoreau:

“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”

Estée Lauder:

“I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.”

Sonia Sotomayor:

“Success is its own reward, but failure is a great teacher too, and not to be feared.”

Booker T. Washington:

“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.”

Coco Chanel:

“Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.”

Andy Grove:

“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

Dale Carnegie:

“Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.”

Charles Darwin:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

The Best Quotes On Reality Checks

Steve Case:

“A vision without the ability to execute it is probably a hallucination.”

Steve Jobs:

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me.”

Nelson Mandela:

“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

Upton Sinclair:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Søren Kierkegaard:

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

Seneca:

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

Woody Allen:

“Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”

Shakespeare:

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”

Carl Jung:

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”

J.P. Morgan:

“A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”

H.L. Mencken:

“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”

James Allen:

“Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.”

Niccolo Machiavelli:

“The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.”

Lin Yutang:

“When small men cast big shadows, it means the sun is setting.”

Winston Churchill:

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”

Bertrand Russell:

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

Jim Collins:

“Arrogance destroys the very thing it seeks to build.”

Richard Feynman:

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Demosthenes:

“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”

Edward R. Murrow:

“The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.”

Warren Buffett:

“In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.”

Albert Einstein:

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Philip Tetlock:

“Beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

“Missing a train is only painful if you run after it.”

Herbert Simon:

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

H.L. Mencken:

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Daniel Kahneman:

“Confidence is a feeling, not a calculation.”

The Best Quotes On Truth

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”

Salman Rushdie:

“Our lives teach us who we are.”

Dorothy L. Sayers:

“The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.”

Gloria Steinem:

“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

Voltaire:

“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”

Arthur Schopenhauer:

“Every truth passes through three stages: ridicule, violent opposition, and acceptance.”

Ida B. Wells:

“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

Louis Brandeis:

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

Denis Diderot:

“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.”

Sojourner Truth:

“Truth is powerful and it prevails.”

Tertullian:

“The first reaction to truth is hatred.”

Virginia Woolfe:

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

Pablo Picasso:

‘“We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.”

Georges Braque:

“Truth exists; only lies are invented.

The Best Quotes On Leadership

Rosalynn Carter:

“A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they ought to be.”

Andrew Carnegie:

“No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.”

Niccolò Machiavelli:

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”

Lee Iacocca:

“There’s a world of difference between a strong ego, which is essential, and a large ego, which can be destructive.”

Samuel Goldwyn:

“I don’t want yes–men around me. I want everyone to tell the truth, even if it costs them their jobs.”

Plato:

“He who is not a good servant will not be a good master.”

Benjamin Franklin:

“A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.”

Charles de Gaulle:

“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”

Ralph Nader:

“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”

Stephen Covey:

“What you do has far greater impact than what you say.”

Lao Tzu:

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: We did it ourselves.”

The Best Quotes On Management

Peter Drucker:

“Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.”

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Sam Walton:

“There is only one boss: The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

J. Paul Getty:

“The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.”

Warren Buffett:

“In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”

Michael Eisner:

“If you’re soft and fuzzy, like our little characters, you become the skinny kid on the beach, and people in this business don’t mind kicking sand in your face.”

John C. Maxwell:

“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”

Charlie Munger:

“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.”

John Kenneth Galbraith:

“Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”

Thomas Sowell:

“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.”

Isaac Asimov:

“The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.”

W. Edwards Deming:

“In God we trust. All others must bring data.”

Benjamin Graham:

“The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.”

Reed Hastings:

“Don’t tolerate brilliant jerks.”

Peter Drucker:

“Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.”

Steven Covey:

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”

The Best Quotes Offering Career Advice

Bob Newhart:

“I worked in accounting for two and a half years... and decided I was just going to give comedy a try.”

Confucius:

“If you try to do too much, you will not achieve anything.”

Bruce Lee:

“A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.”

T.S. Eliot:

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”

Bruce Lee:

“A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.”

George Carlin:

“Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.”

Mark Twain:

“A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.”

Lane Kirkland:

“If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.”

Sun Tzu:

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.”

Bertrand Russell:

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”

Benjamin Franklin:

“Never ruin an apology with an excuse.”

Henry David Thoreau:

“The true price of anything you do is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

Somerset Maugham:

“People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.”

Warren Buffett:

“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”

Toni Morrison:

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

Gabriel García Márquez:

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old; they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

Indra Nooyi:

“There is nothing like a concrete life plan to weigh you down.”

Warren Buffett:

“You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”

Muriel Siebert:

“You create opportunities by performing, not complaining.”

Hillary Clinton:

“Take criticism seriously, but not personally.”

Booker T. Washington:

“Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.”

Socrates:

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”

The Best Quotes On Corporate Responsibility

Colonel Sanders:

“Feed the poor and get rich or feed the rich and get poor.”

Charles Pickering:

“Media corporations have a civic responsibility not only to prevent fraud and financial abuse, but also to not corrupt or degrade our culture.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt:

“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”

Walter Cronkite:

“America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”

George Bernard Shaw:

“We have no right to consume happiness without producing it.”

Ralph Nader:

“The life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull.”

Dolores Huerta:

“We must use our lives to make the world a better place to live, not just to acquire things.”

Ben Horowitz:

“Take care of the people, the products, and the profits - in that order.”

Herb Kelleher:

“Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy.”

Steven Wright:

“99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.”

The Best Quotes On Ambition

Joseph Stilwell:

“The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of its behind.”

Abraham Lincoln:

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

Edmund Burke:

“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.”

T.S. Eliot:

“Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.”

William Shakespeare:

“Nothing is so common as the wish to be remarkable.”

Elvis Presley:

“Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.”

Baruch Spinoza:

“Ambition is the immoderate desire for power.”

Robert Frost:

“By faithfully working eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.”

The Best Quotes On Debt

Gordon Bethune:

“A bankruptcy judge can fix your balance sheet, but he cannot fix your company.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.”

“A man in debt is so far a slave.”

Publilius Syrus:

“Debt is the slavery of the free.”

Benjamin Franklin:

“Creditors have better memories than debtors.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz:

“Anybody who knows about capitalism knows that bankruptcy is an essential part of capitalism.”

John Maynard Keynes:

“If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.”

David Graber:

“As it turns out, we don’t ‘all’ have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.”

Noam Chomsky:

“Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think.”

Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld:

“It is no tragedy to do ungrateful people favors, but it is unbearable to be indebted to a scoundrel.”

The Best Quotes On Money

Mark Twain:

“A lack of money is the root of all evil.”

Benjamin Franklin:

“If you would like to know the value of money, try to borrow some.”

Bob Hope:

“A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove you don’t need it.”

Voltaire:

“When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Money often costs too much.”

Dorothy Parker:

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

Spike Mulligan:

“Money can’t buy you happiness but it does bring a more pleasant form of misery.”

Leonardo da Vinci:

“He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.”

Epictetus:

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

The Best Quotes On Bureaucracy

Clay Shirky:

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

Robert Conquest:

“Every organization appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.”

James C. Collins:

“The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.”

George Bernard Shaw:

“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”

Mahatma Gandhi:

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation.”

Milton Berle:

“What is a committee? A group that keeps minutes and loses hours.”

Oscar Wilde:

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”

Paul McNulty:

“If you think compliance is expensive, try non–compliance.”

Milton Friedman:

“Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.”

The Best Quotes On Monopolies

Peter Thiel:

“The people who have monopolies pretend not to have them, and the people who don’t have monopolies pretend to have them.”

Nancy Pearcey:

“Competition is always a good thing. It forces us to do our best. A monopoly renders people complacent and satisfied with mediocrity.”

Robert Anton Wilson:

“A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production.”

Serj Tankian:

“If you allow for a purely capitalistic society, without any type of regulation at all, you will get one monopoly that will eat all of the smaller fish and own everything, and then you'll have zero capitalism, zero competition – it would just be one giant company.”

Mario Puzo:

Like many businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly.”

Steve Balmer:

“We don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference.”

“I don't know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me.

Howard Hughes:

“We don't have a monopoly. Anyone who wants to dig a well without a Hughes bit can always use a pick and shovel.”

Rupert Murdoch:

“Monopoly is a terrible thing, till you have it.”

The Best Quotes On Taxes

Will Rogers:

“The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.”

“The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has.”

Albert Einstein:

“The hardest thing in the world is to understand the income tax.”

Ernie Banks:

“When I wake up in the morning, I feel like a billionaire without paying taxes.”

Barry Goldwater:

“The income tax has created more criminals than any other single act of government.”

Winston Churchill:

“There’s no such thing as a good tax.”

John Marshall:

“The power to tax involves the power to destroy.”

Thomas Jefferson:

“To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”

Ronald Reagan:

“You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes.”

David Mazzucchelli:

“Yes, here's to the founding fathers – slave-owners, British citizens who didn't want to pay taxes.”

HermanWouk:

“Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.”

Leona Helmsley:

“We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”

The Best Quotes On Strategy

Mike Tyson:

“Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”

Shirley Chisholm:

“If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”

Sun Tzu:

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

Winston Churchill:

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”

Michael Porter:

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

Amelia Earhart:

“The most difficult thing is the decision to act; the rest is merely tenacity.”

Eleanor Roosevelt:

“It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.”

Margaret Thatcher:

“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”

Marie Curie:

“One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.”

James Baldwin:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Sun Tzu:

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war.”

Epictetus:

“No great thing is created suddenly.”

Seneca:

“If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.”

Martin Luther King:

“All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.”

David Packard:

“More businesses die from indigestion than starvation.”

Edward Abbey:

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Karl Marx:

“Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.”

The Best Quotes On Ignorance

Aldous Huxley

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

H.L. Mencken:

“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Bertrand Russell:

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Julius Caesar:

“Men willingly believe what they wish.”

Lao Tau:

“Those who know do not boast. Those who boast do not know.”

Socrates:

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

Epictetus:

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”

Charlie Munger:

“Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.”

William Osler:

“The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism.”

Martin Luther King Jr.:

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

Clarence Darrow:

“History repeats itself. That’s one of the things wrong with history.”

Benjamin Franklin:

“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”

David Storey:

“The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.”

Charlie Munger:

“People calculate too much and think too little.”

“I just try and avoid being stupid.”

Albert Einstein:

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

W. Edwards Deming:

“Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.”

B.F. Skinner:

“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.”

Lou Holtz:

“The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it.”

Miguel de Cervantes:

“Too much sanity may be madness.”

Winston Churchill:

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.”

Baruch Spinoza:

“The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self.”

The Best Quotes On Liberty

George Bernard Shaw:

“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

Aristotle:

“The weak are always anxious for justice and equality. The strong pay no heed to either.”

José Martí:

“Only tyranny fears the full expression of liberty.”

“A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one’s self from the tyranny of any of them.”

“Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.”

“We are free, but not to be evil.”

Epictetus:

“No man is free who is not master of himself.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

“No man is more hopelessly enslaved than the man who falsely believes he is free.”

Audre Lorde:

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

The Best Quotes On Autocracy

Alice Walker:

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

Ida B. Wells:

“One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.”

Toni Morrison:

“If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.”

Frederick Douglass:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

Stephen King:

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”

J. Paul Getty:

“The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.”

Audre Lorde:

“We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.”

Harvey Milk:

“Hope will never be silent.”

Noam Chomsky:

“Under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control.”

The Best Quotes Offering Inspiration

Marie Curie:

“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”

Anaïs Nin:

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe:

“The longest day must have its close.”

Golda Meir:

“Don’t be humble. You’re not that great.”

Mae West:

“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”

Edith Wharton:

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

Anne Frank:

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

Florence Nightingale:

“How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.”

Gabriel García Márquez:

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

George Bernard Shaw:

“When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.”

Eleanor Roosevelt:

“A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water.”

The Best Quotes On Marketing

Jeff Bezos:

“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

Bill Gates:

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

John D. Rockeller:

“Don't blame the marketing department. The buck stops with the chief executive.”

Sinclair Lewis:

“Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.”

James Altucher:

“The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.”

Roy H. Williams:

“In marketing you must choose between boredom, shouting and seduction. Which do you want?”

Sheryl Crow:

“That feeling of freedom, open highways of possibilities, has kind of been lost to materialism and marketing.”

Fred Allen:

“An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.”

Louis Kronenberger:

“The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.”

Avinash Kaushik:

“Never let ads write checks your website can't cash.”

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” – Warren Buffett

The Wall Street Journal had quite a field day with Bill Gates’ reputation this week, running with this headline: Bill Gates Spent Years Crafting His Image. Now It’s Cracking.

The publication reported allegations of more than 20 affairs during his 27 years of marriage to Melinda French Gates, who divorced him as his name emerged in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

When you’re a legendary tech founder and a billionaire philanthropist, you have a lot of eyes on your life. It must take quite a staff to hide more than 20 affairs in 27 years.

Epstein knew about the trysts and may have used this information to blackmail Gates, the WSJ reports.

One of the ickiest revelations in the WSJ story, though, was its lead focus on a mannequin, which is sized to Gates’ precise proportions and used to test his apparel.

You know how they say billionaires are no different? That they put their pants on one leg at a time? Not Bill Gates.

The WSJ reports that he has a whole crew to choose his outfits for public appearances. The team has to come up with three options and submit them for approval by senior staff, the WSJ reports.

The objective is to make him look like Mister Rogers. Not some billionaire tech monopolist who hooked up with Russian women and ran with the world’s most notorious sex offender. Mister Fred Rogers, and a beautiful day in the neighborhood to you, too.

For the record, the Epstein files include more than 1,000 emails connecting the dead creep to Gates, his foundation, or people who worked for Gates.

Gates long claimed his relationship with Epstein was all about philanthropy.

In 2019, Netflix released a suck-up documentary, “Inside Bill’s Brain,” which barely touched on the subject, except to make room for this denial:

“I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him. … There were people around him who were saying, hey, if you want to raise money for global health and get more philanthropy, he knows a lot of rich people. Every meeting where I was with him were meetings with men. I was never at any parties or anything like that.”

Gates has apologized for his mistake, denied any illegal activities, and plans to appear before the House Oversight Committee next month to field questions.

Maybe he’ll come dressed as Mister Rogers. But as Mister Rogers once said: “Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.”

Read More On Epstein:

• Banking On Epstein (Business Blunders)

• Sultan Of Sleaze (Business Blunders)

• An Epstein Valentine (Business Blunders)

• Party With Mr. Dahmer (Business Blunders)

• Networking With A Pedophile (Business Blunders)

• Meditations With A Sex Offender (Business Blunders)

• Winter Is Coming For Summers (Business Blunders)

• Was Maxwell Smart? (Business Blunders)

It’s the debt, stupid

Don’t freak out yet, but the national debt will likely eclipse $40 trillion in October.

It’s a nice round number, completely incomprehensible to the average hundredaire or thousandaire voter, yet a milestone that might raise alarm bells.

We’re already at more than $39.2 trillion, so what’s a few billion more? Let’s a have an endless war. Let have another tax cut. Let’s guild all of Washington in gold.

Republicans talk about fiscal discipline and then cut taxes. Democrats talk about fiscal responsibility and then expand domestic programs.

No one knows when it will end, but this is how it will end.

If the Reagan-era “trickle down theory” ever held true, what’s pouring down is debt.

The Federal Reserve reports:

• Americans now owe a record $18.8 trillion in household debt.

• Credit card balances have eased somewhat but remain near record highs at about $1.25 trillion.

• Auto loans total nearly $1.7 trillion.

• Student loans hover around $1.6 trillion.

The numbers have grown so large that they barely register anymore, but they will. With inflation still raging, the odds of a Fed rate hike are rising and bond yields have already been on an upswing. So like everything else, the interest rates on all this debt is going to feel crushing.

The most troubling figure may be the personal savings rate, which recently fell to just 2.6% from 4.3% in January. Big debt-small savings leaves households with less room to absorb layoffs, medical emergencies, recessions or market downturns.

Maybe artificial intelligence will save us all.

Earlier this week, I explored the problem with Paul Vigna, my former colleague from The Wall Street Journal, a fellow Substacker, and author of “The Almightier: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin.”

You’re not probably not going to like his solution: Print More Money.

His idea would be for the government to decree all debts cancelled and print more dollars to cover the damage to creditors. It would be like a Biblical Jubilee, only on a far more Biblical scale.

Does anyone out there have any better ideas? I’d love to hear them here.

Leave a comment

I warned about our debt problem in November 2024: “We’ve just elected a man to the White House who has never shown an inkling of restraint.”

Read More: Hello? What About The $36 Trillion Tab? (Business Blunders)

“We face the most predictable economic crisis in history,” Erskine Bowles told me in 2013.

Bowles had served as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. He teamed up with a former Republican U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson to co-chair President Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

They were trying to reach Democrats and Republicans. Nobody cared.

Don’t Miss These Blunders

• Trash It, Crash It, Cash It The financial world needs honest short sellers. Prosecutors convinced a jury that Andrew Left at Citron Research wasn’t one of them.

• Cut Staff, Get Money UnitedHealthcare’s business model draws more scrutiny. Massachusetts’ Attorney General says it overcharged the state by more than $100 million.

• Suited And Booted BP has cycled through blundering executives for decades from John Browne’s scandalous courtroom lie to Albert Manifold’s alleged bullying

• When Schlitz Went To Schitz The beer that made Milwaukee famous never recovered from its cost-cutting moves in the 1970s.

• Amazon’s Philosopher King Jeff Bezos is just another bloviating billionaire talking his book on CNBC. Taxes are still coming out of your check.

• Cruci-fried Chicken Has Chick-fil-A been closing on the wrong day for the Sabbath? A federal lawsuit is putting a Texas franchisee of this famously pious chicken chain on the grill.

• The Patriot Economy: Trump, Jesus, Liberty – Ponzi – Edwin Brant Frost IV pleads guilty to a $140 million scheme he peddled on conservative media

• Illegal Eagles – Elite corporate lawyers allegedly formed an insider trading ring and “made out like bandits” with clients’ confidential information

• The White-Collar Playbook – The most common types of financial fraud and the companies that didn’t get away with them

• NACHO NACHO Man Wall Street bets Strait of Hormuz stays closed and gasoline prices will sting all summer long

• Full Court Heist Atlanta Hawks senior finance executive Lester T. Jones Jr. is headed to prison after looting his team

• Red Flag Alerts Meets Business Blunders What could go wrong? Everything! And we’ve seen it all before. Watch Herb Greenberg and Al Lewis compare notes on the Golden Age Of Grift.

• This Day In Blunders: About The Series Explore the history of business faux pas, failures and frauds in this day-by-day calendar of calamities

• It Takes Moxie To Push Oxy A pharmacist goes to prison. Purdue Pharma settles. The Sacklers walk.

• Tricolor Me Blue JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Fifth Third Bank can’t escape the obvious conclusions as they defend themselves in a subprime auto lending debacle

• Sand Trap Saudi Arabia launched LIV Golf in a hostile takeover of the sport. Now it looks like the oil-rich nation can’t afford to stay on course.

• Don’t Gloat About Your Moat A common turn of phrase helped prosecutors win an antitrust ruling against Live Nation. Could its concert monopoly finally be over?

• The Substack Ponzi Tyler Bossetti built a huge social media following. His secret: 30% investment returns.

• A Friend Of A Friend Of Epstein Warren Buffett gave Bill Gates’ foundation $43 billion. Now he doesn’t even talk to the guy.

Read More About The Book: The Gods Or Money (Business Blunders)

Religions are at odds with each other. Religious people don’t always agree with each other – even within their own sects. But everyone seems to worship at the alter of money and conspicuous consumerism. And everyone seems to commit the too-often deadly sin of debt.

At first blush, religion seems a bit of a departure for Vigna who has spent most of his career covering equity markets, economics and cryptocrrencies. Or maybe capitalism is more of a religion and less of a science than we think.

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If you want to be loved on Wall Street, don’t be a loud-mouthed short seller.

CEOs will blame you. Retail investors will curse you. Politicians will attack you. And sometimes even prosecutors will gun for you – even if you are right.

In a free market, short sellers are God's little messengers warning us that all is not right with the financial world.

Shorts were among the first to spot the rot at Enron, Lehman Brothers, Wirecard and countless other corporate disasters. During the financial crisis, Lehman Brothers convinced Washington that short sellers were the problem. History later revealed that Lehman was the problem.

Which brings us to Citron Research founder Andrew Left, one of America’s best-known activist short sellers.

Left, 55, was convicted Monday on securities-fraud charges stemming from what prosecutors described as a long-running market-manipulation scheme that generated roughly $21 million in profits. He now faces up to 25 years in prison when he is sentenced on Aug. 31.

Formerly a frequent guest on CNBC, Fox Business and Bloomberg Television, Left has been loudly unrepentant and plans to appeal the verdict. Yes, he’s continuing the very kind of bluster that made him a prosecutorial target in the first place.

Here’s what the man who is always talking his book told The New York Times:

“Amazing. I was actually criminally convicted on manipulating Nvidia Facebook and Tesla for telling the truth and making a profit. I am a bit speechless.”

“What this does for future of free speech is chilling. Can Individual investors not talk SpaceX? Wow. Still shocked.”

Read More On Left: Beyond Stupid (Business Blunders)

Oddly enough, prosecutors did not even try to prove that anything Left said about companies was false. And free speech is always a compelling defense.

Unfortunately, self-expression is not what this case was about.

Left was convicted because prosecutors convinced a jury that he was saying one thing while instantly doing another. He implied he was holding short positions when he was actually dumping them as soon as his TV and social media bluster drove them down.

Why wait for a hard-researched investing thesis to come true when you can profit simply by announcing one?

A 2024 indictment also accused Left of tipping off hedge funds in advance, giving them a chance to pile into trades, accelerating downward price momentum, before his market-moving reports and appearances drove shares lower. He was allegedly even paid for the service.

We’ve all heard of pump-and-dump artists. Left was accused of being a deflate-and-dump artist. We’ve all heard of stock promoters. Left was a stock demoter.

Prosecutors said he convinced investors to sell shares or short stocks alongside him – and then, true to his name, he Left.

Read more

Read More About The Book: The Gods Or Money (Business Blunders)

Religions are at odds with each other. Religious people don’t always agree with each other – even within their own sects. But everyone seems to worship at the alter of money and conspicuous consumerism. And everyone seems to commit the too-often deadly sin of debt.

At first blush, religion seems a bit of a departure for Vigna who has spent most of his career covering equity markets, economics and cryptocurrencies. Or maybe capitalism is more of a religion and less of a science than we think.

I’m looking forward to what Paul has to say now that his book has been circulating since July.

Click here to join the livestream and bring your questions. It’d be great to have you in the conversation.

“A lifetime of treatment is preferable to a cure.”– Elisabeth Rosenthal

UnitedHealthcare coded its members as sicker than they were so it could overcharge the state of Massachusetts’ Medicaid system by more than $100 million, according to a lawsuit filed by the state’s attorney general on Friday.

The nation’s largest health insurer pursued a “growth-at-all-costs strategy” through its Senior Care Options program, the lawsuit alleges.

“Cut staff,” “[g]et more numbers,” and “[g]et more money from the state,” is how the program ran, the complaint filed by Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell says.

Sound familiar?

Minnesota-based UnitedHealth called the lawsuit “meritless” and the AG “simply wrong.”

For now, this is just another chapter in what is becoming a long-running medical drama.

The insurer has been under fire since Brian Thompson, the CEO of its UnitedHealthcare division, was gunned down in the streets of New York City in December 2024.

On the day that the alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione, made his first court appearance in February 2025, The Wall Street Journal published an exclusive, page-one story reporting that the Justice Department was investigating UnitedHealth’s Medicare billing practices.

Mangione, meanwhile, has pleaded not guilty in widely followed proceedings where he is sometimes lauded as a folk hero. Yes, it’s a sick company in a sick world.

UnitedHealth has also drawn Justice Department scrutiny for assembling a healthcare empire that reaches far beyond insurance. Through its Optum subsidiaries, the company insures patients, employs doctors, processes claims, manages prescription-drug benefits, and collects data from nearly every step of the healthcare transaction.

Do you see the checks and balances in America’s healthcare system? OK, how about just the checks?

UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty was bagging annual compensation worth $26 million a year until he abruptly resigned in May 2025. On the day after his resignation announcement, The Wall Street Journal reported that UnitedHealth was “under criminal investigation for possible Medicare fraud.”

The patients may have gotten sicker on paper. But the company could be getting even sicker in court.

Googling the future

Federal prosecutors say a Google software engineer parlayed confidential search data into a $1.2 million Polymarket winning streak.

Michele Spagnuolo, 36, allegedly made big bets on who would emerge among the most-searched people of 2025, but unlike most others on the prediction market, he wasn’t speculating. He allegedly misappropriated the answers.

The Italian citizen residing in Switzerland traded under the name “AlphaRaccoon,” which sounds like a varmint that goes dumpster-diving through data bins.

Just goes to show that when you’re betting on Polymarket or Kalshi, you’re guessing about the future against others who damn well know it.

The AlphaRaccoon is now facing multiple charges and decades in prison. Google put him on leave from a gig where he was easily making seven figures a year.

Sometimes the smartest money makes the dumbest bets.

Running on fumes

American households have spent an extra $450 on energy since President Donald Trump launched his war on Iran, according to Moody’s Analytics in an analysis shared exclusively with CNBC on Friday.

The real pain though, is up the road.

“Unless the war ends soon, financially pressed consumers will have no option but to turn more cautious in their spending, threatening the already soft economy,” Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi told CNBC.

Fuel prices haven’t soared too high because the world has been tapping strategic reserves and inventories, but those tanks are running dry.

“We’re approaching unheard of inventory levels. I mean really, really low levels,” said Exxon Senior Vice President Neil Chapman said at a New York investor conference on Thursday. “

“You can debate whether that’s going to hit, those really low levels, in two weeks or three weeks. Once you get to that point, then you’ll see price shoot up.”

Oil prices have recently slipped below $90 a barrel on hopes that the war could end soon. Phew! But Chapman says they could soon rise to $150 if it doesn’t.

And you know that Iran would love to see that happen, no matter what it costs its people. It may be an even better lever on the world than commanding a nuclear arsenal.

And then he was sentenced to … four years in the White House

Don’t Miss These Blunders

• Suited And Booted BP has cycled through blundering executives for decades from John Browne’s scandalous courtroom lie to Albert Manifold’s alleged bullying

• When Schlitz Went To Schitz The beer that made Milwaukee famous never recovered from its cost-cutting moves in the 1970s.

• Amazon’s Philosopher King Jeff Bezos is just another bloviating billionaire talking his book on CNBC. Taxes are still coming out of your check.

• Cruci-fried Chicken Has Chick-fil-A been closing on the wrong day for the Sabbath? A federal lawsuit is putting a Texas franchisee of this famously pious chicken chain on the grill.

• The Patriot Economy: Trump, Jesus, Liberty – Ponzi – Edwin Brant Frost IV pleads guilty to a $140 million scheme he peddled on conservative media

• Illegal Eagles – Elite corporate lawyers allegedly formed an insider trading ring and “made out like bandits” with clients’ confidential information

• The White-Collar Playbook – The most common types of financial fraud and the companies that didn’t get away with them

• NACHO NACHO Man Wall Street bets Strait of Hormuz stays closed and gasoline prices will sting all summer long

• Full Court Heist Atlanta Hawks senior finance executive Lester T. Jones Jr. is headed to prison after looting his team

• Red Flag Alerts Meets Business Blunders What could go wrong? Everything! And we’ve seen it all before. Watch Herb Greenberg and Al Lewis compare notes on the Golden Age Of Grift.

• This Day In Blunders: About The Series Explore the history of business faux pas, failures and frauds in this day-by-day calendar of calamities

• It Takes Moxie To Push Oxy A pharmacist goes to prison. Purdue Pharma settles. The Sacklers walk.

• Tricolor Me Blue JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Fifth Third Bank can’t escape the obvious conclusions as they defend themselves in a subprime auto lending debacle

• Sand Trap Saudi Arabia launched LIV Golf in a hostile takeover of the sport. Now it looks like the oil-rich nation can’t afford to stay on course.

• Don’t Gloat About Your Moat A common turn of phrase helped prosecutors win an antitrust ruling against Live Nation. Could its concert monopoly finally be over?

• The Substack Ponzi Tyler Bossetti built a huge social media following. His secret: 30% investment returns.

• A Friend Of A Friend Of Epstein Warren Buffett gave Bill Gates’ foundation $43 billion. Now he doesn’t even talk to the guy.
  Steal Crypto, Buy Pokémon Technology has infected our economy with unprecedented stupidity

• Banking On Epstein The sex trafficker couldn’t have done it without America’s biggest banks. Now Bank of America is paying off his victims.

• Back In The Box Renault-Nissan’s fugitive CEO Carlos Ghosn fled Japan in a crate. Now his Beirut refuge is under fire.

• The Wizard of Oz Goes to Florida Dr. Mehmet Oz is hunting healthcare fraudsters in the Sunshine State. Why? So they can run for governor or the U.S. Senate?

Another BP suit just got the boot.

Suddenly, Albert Manifold is no longer chairman following “serious concerns” over “governance standards, oversight and conduct,” the global oil giant announced on Tuesday.

He says he was fired without explanation and disputes what he called “lies” about his conduct. The financial press is reporting that he bullied staffers and swore a lot.

BP used to stand for British Petroleum, then Beyond Petroleum. Some say it stands for “Big Polluter.” It may just as well be named Boardroom Pandemonium.

The company churns through executives almost as fast as it spills oil. It’s had four CEOs and three chairmen since 2023, including interim roles.

Manifold reportedly ousted the last CEO, Murray Auchincloss in December and helped install its current CEO Meg O’Neill.

Auchincloss got the job after Bernard Looney was fired in 2023 when BP revealed he had multiple undisclosed dalliances with underlings. It was as if he thought the company was his personal Tinder app.

But let’s go back further to Tony Hayward.

Hayward resigned in 2010 after mismanaging BPs response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which killed 11 people and devastated the Gulf of Mexico. He tried to minimize the disaster by saying stupid things, including:

• “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

• “I’d like my life back.”

But let’s go back even further to CEO John Browne, who resigned in 2007.

Browne lied in court during litigation stemming from a messy break-up with his partner.

Browne was also under scrutiny at the time for his ruthless cost-cutting and the disasters that ensued under his watch, including major pipeline leaks in Alaska and the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 workers.

But it was perjury that did him in. Browne sued Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Mail on Sunday, to stop the paper from publishing allegations from his former partner, Jeff Chevalier.

Don't Miss These Blunders

Browne told the court they had met “while jogging” in London’s Battersea Park. Evidence showed they’d met through a male escort website. A judge concluded that Browne lied under oath, which is not a good look for a well-dressed executive.

And the name of the male-escort website? “Suited and Booted,” which is exactly where Browne ended up … and more to follow.

Read more

Quick question for anyone bemoaning the demise of Schlitz: Why didn’t you drink it?

The last rounds of “the beer that made Milwaukee famous” began pouring over the holiday weekend with at least some people trying to give it a dignified send off.

The 177-year-old label once adorned the top-selling beer in America – a status it lost to an executive blunder from which it never recovered.

In 1976, Robert Uihlein Jr. decided to reformulate the beer his great‐great uncle August Krug began selling in 1849.

He’d taken the helm in 1961 as a fourth-generation heir to the brewing giant. He came armed with a Harvard education, the approval of Milwaukee’s civic society, and a drive for modern corporate efficiency.

Uihlein shortened aging times, accelerated fermentation, replaced ingredients and used more stabilizers. One of them was called “Chill-Garde” and it gave the beer a consistency that some customers described as “slime” and even worse, “snot.”

The move would become a business school case study on what not to do – a disaster on par with New Coke. But Uihlein didn’t live long enough to turn the tide like Coca-Cola. He died of leukemia at age 60 and Chill-Garde might as well have been his epitaph.

The brewer carried on with his legacy, pushing back against critics, insisting the slimy flakes floating in their glasses were not a problem. But soon Schlitz secretly recalled millions of bottles and did not address the fiasco publicly.

Too bad its customers had taste buds.

When you’re out of Schlitz … there’s always Budweiser.

Sales went into a tailspin as competitors guzzled market share. Schlitz doubled down on its folly, famously launching what marketing history records as the “Drink Schlitz, or I’ll kill you” campaign.

The ads featured tough guys, including a boxer and a wilderness man. Asked to switch beers, they glared menacingly into the camera: “You want to take away my gusto?”

Somehow, these humorously cast macho men couldn’t intimidate anyone into drinking skanky beer. Competitors were already moving ahead with softer characters catching the eyes of beautiful women while drinking light beers.

“Tastes great! Less filling!” was making a killing.

Gusto went busto.

Don't Miss These Blunders

Read more

“Money is the best deodorant.” – Elizabeth Taylor

Somewhere in Queens there’s a nurse who needs more disposable income to shop at Whole Foods and keep the Amazon economy humming.

Jeff Bezos has a solution. No more taxes for her, or the rest of the afflicted working class.

“We shouldn't be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington,” he said on CNBC this week. “They should be sending her an apology.”

It’s not enough to sit quietly when you’re the world’s fourth-richest man. You have to be a philosopher king.

Bezos must have climbed down from his $575 million super yacht, still aglow from his $50 million wedding, onto one of his multimillion-dollar Gulf Stream jets, to one of his cash-incinerating rocket factories, to dispense his wisdom.

Here is the mind-blowing revelation he delivered:

“I think what’s going on is that it’s kind of a tale of two economies, so you have a bunch of people in this country who are doing really well, but you also have a bunch of people in this country who are struggling.”

Wow! Has not a single economist even considered that until just now?

It must be one of those K-shaped economies, huh?

Thank the good Lord there’s finally a guy worth $275 billion willing to explain inequality to all those hundred-aires and thousand-aires hoping to get rich watching CNBC.

This, of course, is about as clueless as the time Bezos thanked Amazon employees and customers for paying for his expensive vacation in outer space.

And if all those poor workers should pay zero in taxes, should all those poor billionaires pay more to fill the gap?

Well, um, ah, yeah, that’s I guess, a policy debate, Bezos hemmed, but …

“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens.”

Meantime, it would be nice if everyone stopped picking on billionaires because, billionaires have feelings, too, ya know.

“Politicians are using the kind of age-old technique ,” Bezos said. “Picking a villain and pointing fingers, but the problem is that doesn’t solve anything.”

Oh, but yes, it does. In fact, it solves everything in our purported democracy. Because politicians need two things to stay in office: Money from the rich and votes from the poor.

That’s why they trash the uber rich in public. And suck-up behind closed doors.

All the billionaire class needs to do, while in nearly full control of almost everything, is put up with a bit of populist rhetoric around election time.

A nurse in Queens would love a tax break, but she doesn’t need a lecture about billionaire victimhood. Bezos should just get back in his rocket and take off.

At least crypto flows through the Strait

Where did Iran get the billions needed to fight us?

Through the world’s largest crypto platform, Binance, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

The Journal got ahold of internal Binance compliance reports showing that an “anti-sanction operator” named Babak Zanjani made $850 million in crypto transactions on a single trading account.

The loot was part of the billions that have flowed through Binance and funded Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp.’s in the two years preceding the U.S.-Iran war, The Journal reports.

Zanjani’s involvement had not been previously reported. Binance disputes the report but this has been going on for a long time.

In November 2023, Binance pleaded guilty to criminal charges and agreed to pay more than $4 billion in penalties for allowing transactions involving sanctioned nations, including Iran.

And in April 2024, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison for anti-money laundering law violations.

Then in October, President Donald Trump pardoned Zhao.

Read More: Bombing Iran With Crypto

Was it because Binance backed a crypto venture tied to his family’s World Liberty Financial? Nah, it was because Zhao was just another victim of a Biden witch hunt, according to Trump.

So Zhao caught a billionaire break. Binance is still in business. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Oil is $100 a barrel. And the national average price for a gallon of gasoline is $4.53.

Happy Memorial Day, everybody! Pleasant travels!

Queso, what were they thinking?

The Food and Drug Administration warned a New Jersey cheesemaker in 2020 that its plant was contaminated with listeria. The company shipped the cheese anyway.

In 2021, a listeria outbreak linked to its queso fresco put at least 13 people in the hospital and led to one death across Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Abuelito Cheese Inc. pleaded guilty on Thursday to distributing contaminated food. It faces five years of probation and a fine of $500,000 when it is scheduled for sentencing Oct. 15.

It may also face a raft of lawsuits from victims and their families.

No individuals were charged. Perhaps it would have been cruel and unusual punishment for an Abuelito executive stand for a mug shot and say “cheese.”

Make Nicotine Great Again

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is championing a rebranding of nicotine. Just grab a pouch or a patch and buzz along.

Don’t Miss These Blunders

• Cruci-fried Chicken Has Chick-fil-A been closing on the wrong day for the Sabbath? A federal lawsuit is putting a Texas franchisee of this famously pious chicken chain on the grill.

• The Patriot Economy: Trump, Jesus, Liberty – Ponzi – Edwin Brant Frost IV pleads guilty to a $140 million scheme he peddled on conservative media

• Illegal Eagles – Elite corporate lawyers allegedly formed an insider trading ring and “made out like bandits” with clients’ confidential information

• The White-Collar Playbook – The most common types of financial fraud and the companies that didn’t get away with them

• NACHO NACHO Man Wall Street bets Strait of Hormuz stays closed and gasoline prices will sting all summer long

• Full Court Heist Atlanta Hawks senior finance executive Lester T. Jones Jr. is headed to prison after looting his team

• Red Flag Alerts Meets Business Blunders What could go wrong? Everything! And we’ve seen it all before. Watch Herb Greenberg and Al Lewis compare notes on the Golden Age Of Grift.

• This Day In Blunders: About The Series Explore the history of business faux pas, failures and frauds in this day-by-day calendar of calamities

• It Takes Moxie To Push Oxy A pharmacist goes to prison. Purdue Pharma settles. The Sacklers walk.

• Tricolor Me Blue JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Fifth Third Bank can’t escape the obvious conclusions as they defend themselves in a subprime auto lending debacle

• Sand Trap Saudi Arabia launched LIV Golf in a hostile takeover of the sport. Now it looks like the oil-rich nation can’t afford to stay on course.

• Don’t Gloat About Your Moat A common turn of phrase helped prosecutors win an antitrust ruling against Live Nation. Could its concert monopoly finally be over?

• The Substack Ponzi Tyler Bossetti built a huge social media following. His secret: 30% investment returns.

• A Friend Of A Friend Of Epstein Warren Buffett gave Bill Gates’ foundation $43 billion. Now he doesn’t even talk to the guy.
  Steal Crypto, Buy Pokémon Technology has infected our economy with unprecedented stupidity

• Banking On Epstein The sex trafficker couldn’t have done it without America’s biggest banks. Now Bank of America is paying off his victims.

• Back In The Box Renault-Nissan’s fugitive CEO Carlos Ghosn fled Japan in a crate. Now his Beirut refuge is under fire.

• The Wizard of Oz Goes to Florida Dr. Mehmet Oz is hunting healthcare fraudsters in the Sunshine State. Why? So they can run for governor or the U.S. Senate?

• Trailer Trash Solar A failed auto mechanic blew sunshine at Warren Buffett. Now even his lawyer is headed to prison.

• Billionaire Blind Spot A failed entrepreneur fleeced the super rich. His bankruptcy records were public

• Homer Goes to Hanford America’s Most Dangerous Nuclear Cleanup Runs Like a Simpsons Episode

• Walmart Keeps The Change You thought your tips were going to drivers who dutifully delivered your order. Guess again.

“For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” – Exodus 20:11 (NIV)

The U.S. government has sued a Chick-fil-A franchisee for not giving a Christian a day off on the Sabbath.

Oh, my Lord. Isn’t this a Christian chicken chain that has always been closed on Sundays?

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed the lawsuit this week on behalf of a Church of God member. She belongs to a denomination that observes the Sabbath on Saturday … so there.

The agency has a point under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits religious discrimination. But there’s also a point to be made based on the Bible itself.

Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy and plenty of other Old Testament books identify the Sabbath as the seventh day – the day on which God rested – which is not Sunday. That, for anyone still keeping count, is the first day.

Then there’s the New Testament which shows the earliest Christians were Jews who always observed the Sabbath on Saturdays and still do to this day. (Shabbat Shalom, by the way.)

Jesus was a Jew and here’s what Luke 4:16 (NIV) reports about his observance:

“He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom.”

Quick interpretation: If you’re going to a synagogue on the Sabbath, it’s Saturday.

No where in the scriptures does it explicitly say the Sabbath has been moved to Sunday. But in the centuries after Christ, Christians buried their Jewish past.

As corrupt Roman leaders and pinheads in pointy hats took over the faith, the Sabbath shifted. This was said to mark the day that Jesus rose from the dead and many have argued the switch was God-ordained.

Argue all you want. But whatever you believe, you can’t give some employees the day off for their Sabbath and deny others the day off on their Sabbath. That’s a heartless policy for a company built on public displays of faith, and the EEOC says it’s illegal.

Hatch Trick, the Austin, Texas, Chick-fil-A franchisee named in the agency’s lawsuit, fired the employee when she refused to work on her particular Sabbath.

Perhaps Chick-fil-A has always had this whole Sabbath thing wrong.

The chain could help more families take their divinely prescribed day of rest if it hired a bunch of heathens to keep the place open on Sundays. Then all those fine, upstanding Christian moms wouldn’t have to cook after church.

The bigger issue, though, is that while most Americans express faith in one religion or another, what they more consistently practice is consumerism. And in America’s widely shared religion of consumerism, being closed on Sunday is the real sacrilege.

It’s not just the stock market that’s rigged

The lottery was one of the few places left where average people believed randomness stood a fighting chance against privilege. But an indictment in Texas this week suggests that even the Lotto has a VIP section.

A Texas grand jury indicted former Texas Lottery Commission director Gary Grief over allegations tied to a $95 million Lotto Texas jackpot in 2023. Grief’s attorney says there was no crime and called the move political.

Investigators allege Grief helped a syndicate of professional gamblers as they printed every possible number combination, turning a game of chance into a massive math equation with a guaranteed winner.

The operation used dozens of lottery terminals to churn out more than 25 million tickets in just three days, according to reports by the Houston Chronicle,

Lotteries have long been vulnerable to “buy the pot” schemes. In 1992, for instance, an Australian syndicate pulled off a similar operation in Virginia. But investigators say the Texas job was different because lottery officials allegedly helped pull it off.

Ordinary players were then left to compete against what looked less like ordinary players and more like a hedge fund.

Americans already suspect insiders have rigged everything from stocks to housing to college admissions. Now even the ping-pong balls seem to bounce toward the penthouse.

Feeling depressed? Take Trintellix

Takeda Pharmaceuticals agreed to pay more than $13 million this week to resolve civil allegations that it paid kickbacks to doctors for prescribing its antidepressant medication, Trintellix.

If your doctors think you’re depressed, it could be because they are getting high-paid speaking gigs and eating at pricey restaurants with Takeda reps.

Does Trintellix sound depressing? At least it kept some doctors happy.

Business Blunders is more than a newsletter. It’s an ever-expanding archive of all the things that go wrong in business. This week I am introducing The White Collar Playbook, a compendium of the most common types of financial fraud and blowups that followed. If you want to plan for the future, know the past.

A Big Mac attack on McMoscow

This Day In Blunders

For your daily dose of What Not To Do In Business, join the Business Blunders community on: Substack – LinkedIn – Facebook – X

Don’t Miss These Blunders

• The Patriot Economy: Trump, Jesus, Liberty – Ponzi – Edwin Brant Frost IV pleads guilty to a $140 million scheme he peddled on conservative media

• Illegal Eagles – Elite corporate lawyers allegedly formed an insider trading ring and “made out like bandits” with clients’ confidential information

• The White-Collar Playbook – The most common types of financial fraud and the companies that didn’t get away with them

• NACHO NACHO Man Wall Street bets Strait of Hormuz stays closed and gasoline prices will sting all summer long

• Full Court Heist Atlanta Hawks senior finance executive Lester T. Jones Jr. is headed to prison after looting his team

• Red Flag Alerts Meets Business Blunders What could go wrong? Everything! And we’ve seen it all before. Watch Herb Greenberg and Al Lewis compare notes on the Golden Age Of Grift.

• This Day In Blunders: About The Series Explore the history of business faux pas, failures and frauds in this day-by-day calendar of calamities

• It Takes Moxie To Push Oxy A pharmacist goes to prison. Purdue Pharma settles. The Sacklers walk.

• Tricolor Me Blue JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Fifth Third Bank can’t escape the obvious conclusions as they defend themselves in a subprime auto lending debacle

• Sand Trap Saudi Arabia launched LIV Golf in a hostile takeover of the sport. Now it looks like the oil-rich nation can’t afford to stay on course.

• Don’t Gloat About Your Moat A common turn of phrase helped prosecutors win an antitrust ruling against Live Nation. Could its concert monopoly finally be over?

• The Substack Ponzi Tyler Bossetti built a huge social media following. His secret: 30% investment returns.

• A Friend Of A Friend Of Epstein Warren Buffett gave Bill Gates’ foundation $43 billion. Now he doesn’t even talk to the guy.
  Steal Crypto, Buy Pokémon Technology has infected our economy with unprecedented stupidity

• Banking On Epstein The sex trafficker couldn’t have done it without America’s biggest banks. Now Bank of America is paying off his victims.

• Back In The Box Renault-Nissan’s fugitive CEO Carlos Ghosn fled Japan in a crate. Now his Beirut refuge is under fire.

You can’t trust banks. You can’t trust liberals. You can’t trust people who don’t believe in Christ. So who you gonna trust?

How about Edwin Brant Frost IV, president of First Liberty Building & Loan in Newnan, Georgia?

He shares your values. He shares your faith. He shares your love of Donald J. Trump. And he’s wants you to join him what he calls “the patriot economy.”

“The only thing more rare than a Christian lawyer is a Christian money lender, and if it’s possible to be one, I am trying to be one,” he explained in a video clip published in The Atlanta-Constitution Journal last year.

It ain’t easy serving God and mammon. Biblically, money lenders rank near the bottom of His list.

But Frost IV raised more than $140 million from about 300 investors pitching a blend of God, patriotism and conservative grievance on conservative media platforms.

Then on Tuesday he pleaded guilty to a single count of wire fraud – a charge that could land him 20 years in prison at age 68.

Prosecutors called First Liberty a Ponzi scheme and say Frost blew $5 million of his investors’ money on himself. His expenses included, $2 million on credit card bills; $230,000 for a vacation home rental in Maine; $140,000 on jewelry; and $20,800 on a Patek Philippe watch …

… because nothing says “God and Country” like buying a Patek Philipp with grandma’s retirement money.

It’s a move straight out of The White Collar Playbook and it often sells on platforms that don’t vet their advertisers very well. In Novemeber 2024, for instance, a New Jersey scam artist went to prison for a $658 million Ponzi scheme that former Fox New host Bill O’Reilly personally endorsed on air.

Michael Tinney, of Cedartown, Georgia told the Associated Press that he invested $600,000 in First Liberty after hearing Hugh Hewitt’s hawk it in his national radio broadcast.

Hewitt called Frost IV “Georgia’s George Bailey,” a reference to the fictional banker who sacrifices his dreams for his community in the 1946 classic film, “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

“I worked my whole life to build up savings and have a little bit of retirement so I could just live comfortably,” Tinney said.

But for anyone who trusted the “George Bailey of Georgia,” it’s not a wonderful life.

Read more

Who knew Burger King would buy Tim Hortons?

Who knew Amazon was going to buy iRobot?

Who knew Johnson & Johnson was gunning for a Swiss biopharmaceutical company called Actelion?

A bunch of overpaid lawyers and financial professionals knew, and last week the feds indicted 30 of them, alleging an insider trading ring that ran for more than a decade and netted tens of millions in ill-gotten gains.

The lead tipster was allegedly Nicolo Nourafchan, 43, who worked at Boston-based Goodwin Procter as a corporate lawyer. He owed loyalty, trust and confidence to the firm and its clients, but selling their material non-public information to greedy stock traders allegedly gave a lofty boost to his hourly rate.

Nourafchan also allegedly recruited M&A lawyers at other elite firms – Wachtell Lipton, Weil Gotshal, and Sidley Austin – to provide tips, The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets reported. The firms haven’t been charged, but what a mess to explain to their clients.

Don't Miss These Blunders

“Everyone charged today is accused of scoring significant profits from expected market moves and making out like bandits,” said Ted Docks, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boston Division.

Insider trading is a move straight from The White Collar Playbook.

Is this what they teach at Yale Law School, where Nourafchan graduated? Or is this what you’ve got to do to pay off your student loans? For his part, Nourafchan hasn’t commented or pleaded to the charges. Several other defendants have already pleaded guilty.

Somehow, these brilliant lawyers at the top of our economic system traded messages with easy to crack code words, like “rabbi,” and “flight” and “surgery.”

Prosecutors got a hold of their messages and heard their phone calls. Rabbi meant target company. Flight meant timing. And surgery meant closing. Some examples cited in the indictment:

• “I really need to know when the rabbi is scheduled for surgery.”

• “We are all just waiting for you to tell us when the next flight to Israel is.”

• “It’s coming soon.”.

• “It’s to the moon.”

Or it could be to prison for up to 25 years, where they might see the moon through steel bars.

Read more

Sometimes they may not even realize how far they’ve crossed the line until it’s too late.

Bad choices may seem inconsequential at first, like handy little shortcuts to prosperity. But when they’re justified, repeated and scaled, they can explode, destroying companies and careers, and notching their place in the Blunder Lists.

The Most Common Types of Financial Fraud

White-collar frauds follow repeating patterns throughout history. In their quests to succeed, compete or simply avoid insolvency, even the smartest executives can suffer moral and legal failures. Different industries, different executives, same playbook.

Here’s a look the most common types of financial fraud deployed by companies and executives, and blowups that followed.

Table Of Contents

• Part 1: Frauds That Hurt Investors

• Part 2: Theft From The Inside

• Part 3: Ponzis And Pyramids

• Part 4: Financial System Abuses

• Part 5: Defrauding Public And Government Systems

• Part 6: Corporate Misconduct

• Part 7: Digital Fraud

• Part 8: How Fraud Gets Charged

Part 1. Frauds That Hurt Investors

Accounting fraud: Faking the numbers

When a business underperforms, the temptation is simple: Let the numbers tell a different story. That means inflated revenue, hidden debt, and accounting tricks designed to mislead investors and regulators.

Some of the most notorious accounting fraud examples include:

• Enron – Used off-balance-sheet partnerships to bury losses until the entire structure collapsed.

• Bernie Ebbers (Worldcom) – Oversaw an accounting fraud that inflated earnings by billions.

• Computer Associates – Used “35-day months” to keep the books open longer and record additional revenue.

• Crazy Eddie (Eddie Antar) –Bolster books for an initial public stock offering by ending a skimming scheme and counting the money as growth.

• Bayou Group – Created a fake accounting firm to issue phony books.

The numbers don’t have to be real. They just have to hold up long enough.

Earnings manipulation: Managing the quarter, not the business

Companies smooth results by shifting revenue and earnings into one quarter or another. They may delay losses or rely on one-off adjustments to hit expectations. Sometimes they fake inventories or ship products to warehouses and count them as sales.

These earnings manipulation examples show how companies manage the quarter instead of the business:

• Q.T. Wiles (MiniScribe) – Inflated inventory by shipping boxes of bricks as “hard drives” in one of the most egregious examples of earnings manipulation.

• “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap (Sunbeam) – Used aggressive channel stuffing to pull forward revenue and hit quarterly targets.

• Waste Management – Manipulated depreciation and assets to smooth earnings and avoid recognizing expenses.

• Xerox – Pulled forward revenue from long-term leases to meet Wall Street expectations

The goal isn’t to improve the business. It’s to make the quarter look just good enough.

Securities and investment fraud: Selling stories, not reality

Investors are sold a vision that doesn’t match the underlying business. That can mean exaggerated performance, hidden risks, or entirely fabricated technology. It often begins as a fake-it-’til-you-make it strategy but runs out of time. And sometimes it’s a coverup for executives misappropriating money.

Here are some examples of securities and investment fraud:

• John Rigas (Adelphia Communications) – Concealed billions in off–balance-sheet debt, misleading investors about the company’s financial condition.

• Jordan Belfort (Stratton Oakmont) – Hyped worthless stocks to investors in classic “pump-and-dump” schemes.

• Allen Stanford (Stanford Financial) – Marketed high-yield CDs as safe investments backed by solid assets; in reality, funds were misused in a massive fraud.

• Sandy John Masselli (Carlyle Entertainment) – Solicited at least $3 million in investments for an upcoming initial public stock offering, but his company never even filed an application for an IPO.

The business doesn’t have to be profitable. The story just has to hold.

Insider trading: Profiting from non-public information

Why guess what the market will do when you already know? Insider trading turns confidential information about earnings results, mergers, regulatory decisions into guaranteed gains. It’s illegal for corporate executives and other insiders to trade on material, non-public information.

Some of the most infamous insider trading examples include:

• Rajat Gupta (Goldman Sachs) – Tipped a hedge fund manager about confidential boardroom decisions, including Berkshire Hathaway’s investment.

• Raj Rajaratnam (Galleon Group) – A case that intersects with Gupta. Built a network trading on inside tips across corporate America.

• Michael Milken (Drexel Burnham Lambert) – An icon of 1980s greed and a central figure in the junk bond era.

• Joseph Nacchio (Qwest) – Sold millions in stock while aware of undisclosed business risks.

The edge isn’t always insight. It’s access, until access becomes evidence.

Part 2: Theft From Inside

Embezzlement: Pinching the pot

Money is entrusted to an employee, executive or advisor, then quietly redirected. Often, it’s disguised as routine transactions, reimbursements, or temporary transfers that never come back. The common thread is access, and the belief no one is watching closely enough.

Embezzlement is blatant theft, and all-too-common. Examples include:

• Shan Hanes (Heartland Tri-State Bank) – A small-town bank CEO who bankrupted his institution while becoming a fraud victim himself.

• Dennis Kozlowski (Tyco) – Looted more than $100 million through unauthorized bonuses, art purchases, and company-funded extravagances.

• Michael “Mickey” Monus (Phar-Mor) – Diverted hundreds of millions to cover losses and maintain the illusion of profitability.

• Tom Girardi (attorney) – Embezzled millions from needy clients of his law firm.

The crime isn’t complicated. The safe doors were left wide open.

Procurement and vendor fraud: Faking Invoices, taking bribes

There are plenty of ways for company insiders to establish a fraudulent side hustle. They may inflate invoices or even create bills from vendors that don’t exist at all. They may take kickback or bribes, steering contracts to “friendly” vendors, instead of the lowest bidders. The result is a system where outcomes are bought, not earned.

Examples of procurement and vendor fraud include:

• Lester T. Jones (Atlanta Hawks) – Full Court Heist – Used fake invoices to siphon off $3.7 million for his personal use.

• Michael Kali (Netflix) – Took bribes and kickbacks from vendors seeking contracts from the streaming giant.

• Goldman Sachs – Paid more than $1 billion in bribes to Malaysian and Abu Dhabi officials to obtain billions worth of bond offerings.

• ComEd – Paid allies of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan $1.3 million for little or no work to influence legislation.

• Walmart – Paid bribes to accelerate store growth in Mexico, Brazil, India and China.

It’s not the lowest bid that wins. It’s the one that pays the decision makers under the table.

Bid Rigging: Killing the competition before the game begins

Instead of competing, companies that usually bid against each other decide to collude, rotating contract winners amongst themselves, inflating prices, or submitting fake bids to create the illusion of competition.

Bid-rigging likely occurs more often than it’s prosecuted. Here are some bid-rigging schemes that came to light:

• Tim Leiwekehe (OakviewGroup) – Accused of rigging the bid for the taxpayer-funded Moody Center at the Austin campus of the University of Texas, but won a pardon from President Donald Trump.

• Sotheby’s & Christie’s – Auction houses conspired to fix commissions, eliminating true competition for sellers.

• LIBOR scandal (multiple banks) – Traders coordinated submissions to manipulate benchmark interest rates, distorting outcomes tied to competitive pricing across markets.

• Wilder Fitness Equipment – Coordinated bids and manipulated the competitive process in contracts for fitness equipment sold to schools, universities and other institutions.

The bids look competitive. The winner is already decided.

Part 3: Ponzis And Pyramids

Ponzi schemes: Paying investors with their own money

No profits. Often not even a real company. Just a recruiting operation. In a Ponzi scheme, early investors get paid with incoming funds, creating the illusion of success, until the money runs out.ran the most infamous version, sustaining a multibillion-dollar fraud for decades before it inevitably collapsed.

Ponzi schemes have been carried out for centuries. Some examples include:

• Charles Ponzi (Boston swindler) – Promised high returns from international postal coupons, paying early investors with new money until the scheme collapsed.

• Bernie Madoff (Madoff Securities) –Ran the most infamous version, sustaining a multibillion-dollar fraud for decades before it inevitably unraveled.

• Tom Petters (Petters Co.) – Fabricated a retail financing business and used new investor funds to pay existing ones.

• Eliyahu Weinstein (Optimus Investments) – Raised money for nonexistent real estate deals, using incoming funds to maintain the illusion of returns.

• Thomas Nicholas Salzano (National Realty Investment Advisors) – Ran commercials on Fox News to attract victims for a $658 million fraud.

It’s not really a business or an investment strategy. Just a promise looking for the next unwary investor.

Pyramid schemes: Recruitment disguised as a business

Unlike a Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme doesn’t pretend to invest money. It pretends it’s a business. Participants pay to join, then earn money primarily by recruiting others who pay to join, who then recruit more participants. The product, if there is one, is usually a prop or something that is easily available elsewhere. The structure works as long as the base keeps expanding. But it usually can’t.

Some of the most notable pyramid scheme examples include:

• IM Mastery Academy – Marketed as a trading education platform, but income for many participants depended heavily on recruiting new members.

• Herbalife – After critics called it a pyramid scheme, regulators found the multilevel marketing firm relied heavily on recruiting rather than genuine retail demand.

• Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing – Sold access to telecom and utility services while rewarding recruitment over actual product sales.

• BurnLounge – Claimed to sell online mustic stores, but compensation was primarily tied to recruiting.

The product isn’t the business. The next recruit is.

Part 4: Financial System Abuses

Compliance failures: Looking the other way

Financial institutions are supposed to flag suspicious activity, verify accounts, and stop illicit flows. When they don’t, they become part of the system, whether it’s intentional or not.

Examples of compliance failure:

• Brinks – Moved large sums of cash domestically and across the Southwest border without required controls.

• Bank Of America – Settled lawsuits alleging that is helped enable Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation.

• HSBC – Paid a massive penalty after failing to stop money laundering tied to drug cartels and sanctioned countries, despite clear red flags.

• Danske Bank (Estonia branch) – Mislead U.S. financial institutions as it processed vast sums of suspicious non-resident funds with weak anti-money-laundering controls.

The warning signs are there. The system turns a blind eye.

Bank fraud: Lying for loans

Fake income, concoct assets, misrepresent risks and apply for a loan. Mortgage fraud played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis as lenders approved loans based on unreliable or fabricated information. When defaults rose, the system realized it had been built on bad assumptions and bad data.

Some of the most egregious bank fraud examples include:

• First Brands Group – Accused of taking out loans based on phony collateral and double pledging receivables.

• Tricolor Holdings – Charged with misrepresenting loan performance and underlying collateral to obtain financing.

• Countrywide Financial – Falsified borrower income and documentation to push through mortgages that didn’t meet standards.

• Lee Farkas (Taylor, Bean & Whitaker) – Orchestrated a massive scheme selling banks fake or double-pledged mortgage assets to secure funding.

• Todd and Julie Chrisley (Reality TV) - Convicted for defrauding banks out of more than $30 million.

If phony numbers get you the loan, the truth can wait.

Part 5: Defrauding Government and Public Systems

Healthcare fraud: Billing for what didn’t happen

Charge for unnecessary services. Inflate legitimate ones. Or bill for treatments that never occurred. The scale can be enormous because the system processes massive volumes of claims. But these cases are practically routine.

Some of the most heartless healthcare fraud examples include:

• HCA Healthcare – Billed for unnecessary services and paid kickbacks to drive referrals, inflating Medicare, Medicaid, and TRICARE reimbursements.

• Pfizer – Illegally promoted off-label uses of drugs, leading to improper billing of federal healthcare programs.

• Zynex Medical – Accused of fraudulently over-billing insurers and the U.S. government through excessive and unnecessary claims.

• Tenet Healthcare – Paid kickbacks for patient referrals and billed federal programs for services tied to those arrangements.

The patient is the pretext. The bill is the business.

Tax Evasion: Cheating the taxman

Income goes unreported. Deductions are fabricated. Money is moved offshore without disclosure. Unlike legal tax avoidance, this crosses into deception, misleading authorities to reduce or eliminate tax obligations.

Some notable tax evasion cases include:

• Robert T. Brockman (entreprenuer) – Spent the final years of his life fighting the IRS but lost in death when his estate finally paid.

• RCI Hospitality Holdings – The world’s largest strip club operator accused of bribing a public tax auditor to escape paying sales taxes.

• Michelle O’Connor – A Kansas City Realtor indicted for allegedly founding a two-member church to dodge $40,000 in taxes.

• Wade Cook (business book author) – Evaded federal income tax on $9.5 million in royalties and filed false tax returns.

• Sam Waksal (Imclone) – Before he was famously convicted in an insider trader scheme involving his friend, Martha Stewart, he pleaded guilty two criminal charges for dodging $1.2 million in sales tax on $15 million worth of artwork.

You can hide the money. The IRS may still find it.

Public corruption: Government offices for personal gain

Public power becomes a private asset. Officials steer contracts, influence policy, or abuse authority for financial benefit. It undermines not just individual institutions, but trust in the system itself.

• Michael Madigan (llinois House Speaker) – Convicted in a sweeping corruption case alleging he traded official actions for jobs, contracts, and other benefits through political allies.

• Jack Abramoff (Lobbyist) – Defrauded American Indian tribes seeking influence for their casinos and corrupted public officials with gifts, trips and favors.

• Paul Manafort – Concealed millions in overseas income through offshore accounts and shell companies while secretly advancing the interests of pro-Russia political figures.

• Duke Cunningham (U.S. Congress) – Accepted millions in bribes from defense contractors in exchange for steering government contracts.

• Rita Crundwell (City of Dixon, Ill.) – Created fake vendor accounts and siphoned tens of millions in public funds over decades.

• Kwame Kilpatrick (Detroit mayor) – Used public office for personal enrichment and was convicted on corruption charges.

Public office is not private property.

Part 6: Corporate Misconduct

Environmental crimes: Cutting costs by trashing the planet

Compliance is expensive. Violations are cheaper, at least in the short term. Companies may falsify emissions data, dump waste illegally, or ignore environmental safeguards to protect profits.

Some of the most heinous environmental crime cases include:

• Volkswagen (Dieselgate) – Installed software to cheat emissions tests, triggering one of the most expensive pollution scandals in history.

• BP (Deepwater Horizon) – Cost-cutting and safety failures led to a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, with lasting environmental damage

• Exxon (Exxon Valdez) – Negligence led to what was then the largest oil spill in U.S. history, resulting in massive environmental harm and cleanup costs.

• PG&E (groundwater contamination) – Dumped 370 million gallons of toxic wastewater into unlined ponds at its Hinkley, Calif., compressor station, allowing the effluent to seep into groundwater.

It’s cheaper to break the rules, until the bill for the damages comes due.

Intellectual property theft: Stealing the competitive advantage

Trade secrets, proprietary systems and protected designs are taken without permission. It’s faster than building something from scratch, and often framed internally as “leveling the playing field.” When exposed, it becomes a costly legal and reputational disaster.

Some of the most notable intellectual property theft cases include:

• Huawei (vs. T-Mobile) – Huawei employees allegedly photographed and attempted to remove parts of T-Mobile’s “Tappy” the robot while violating confidentiality agreements with the wireless carrier.

• Samsung (vs. Apple) – Found to have copied key design elements and features of the iPhone, leading to a multibillion-dollar legal battle over smartphone patents.

• Waymo vs. Uber (Anthony Levandowski) – Self-driving car trade secrets were taken and used to accelerate development at a competitor, resulting in a high-profile settlement.

• Kolon Industries – Stole trade secrets from DuPont related to Kevlar production, leading to major damages and a guilty pleading to criminal charges.

Why build it when you can just take it? Because lawsuits and prosecutions could cost you more.

Part 7: Digital Fraud

Cybercrime and computer fraud: Digital access, real-world damage

Phishing, hacking, ransomware, and data breaches can expose millions of records or shut down entire operations. The costs technical financial, legal and reputational.

Some of the biggest cybercrime and computer fraud cases include:

• Equifax – Suffered a massive data breach that exposed sensitive information on millions of consumers, turning a security failure into a corporate crisis.

• Target – Attackers infiltrated the payment system through a third-party vendor, compromising millions of credit and debit card accounts.

• Heartland Payment Systems – One of the largest breaches of payment data, exposing millions of credit card numbers later used for fraud.

• Colonial Pipeline – Ransomware attack forced a shutdown of fuel distribution across the U.S. East Coast, showing how digital breaches can disrupt physical infrastructure.

• Sony Pictures – Hacked by a state-linked group, resulting in leaked data, internal communications, and major operational disruption.

The system goes down. The damage goes everywhere.

Credit card fraud: Cashing in on personal data

Credit card fraud is often the endgame of most data breaches. Fraudsters use stolen personal data to open new lines of credit, drain existing ones, or make unauthorized purchases at scale. The damage spreads quickly, and it’s difficult to fully unwind once the data is out.

Some of the largest identity theft and credit card fraud cases include:

• Wells Fargo – Employees created millions of unauthorized customer accounts using existing client information to meet internal sales targets.

• New Jersey Credit Card Fraud Ring – A sprawling international credit card fraud and money laundering scheme that allegedly caused more than $200 million in losses using stolen credit card data, shell companies and fraudulent transactions.

• Albert Gonzalez – One of the largest credit card theft rings in history, stealing tens of millions of card numbers for resale and fraud

• Max Butler – Trafficked millions of stolen credit card numbers through underground marketplaces.

Once the data is gone, it’s never solely yours again.

Part 8: How Fraud Gets Charged

Money laundering: Cleaning dirty money

Illegal profits are only useful if they can be spent without raising suspicion. So the money moves through shell companies, real estate, financial institutions until its origins are successfully obscured. Money laundering is often an add-on charge for prosecutors as they build their cases.

Common examples of money laundering:

• Changpeng Zhao (Binance) – Failed to maintain anti-money-laundering controls and allowed transactions involving sanctioned nations, including Iran.

• Rick Singer (Varsity Blues) — Coordinated bribes, fake athletic credentials and sham charitable payments to help wealthy clients secure spots at elite universities.

• Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX) – Moved customer funds through affiliated entities in ways that obscured their origin and use, leading to money laundering–related charges.

• Greg Lindberg (insurance tycoon) – Diverted funds through complex, circular transactions, leaving policyholders in bureaucratic limbo while courts and guaranty funds cleaned up the wreckage.

Dirty money is easy to track without a thorough laundering.

Wire fraud: The charge that ties it all together

Most fraud runs over wires these day whether its through emails, texts or bank transfers. That’s all prosecutors need to build a case. Wire fraud doesn’t describe a particular scheme itself. It’s just an easy prosecutorial tool and it is usually piled on tip of other charges.

Notable wire fraud cases include:

• Marc Rich (Glencore) – Indicted on more than 50 felony counts, including wire fraud, for making oil deals with Iran during the 1979-1981 hostage crisis.in 1983.

• Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) – Convicted of wire fraud for transmitting false claims to investors.

• Carlos Watson (Ozy Media) – Charged with wire fraud for misrepresenting company performance and investor interest through electronic communications.

• Trevor Milton (Nikola) – Used media appearances and electronic communications to mislead investors about technology capabilities; convicted of wire fraud

Mail fraud: Prosecutors’ old-school playbook

Before email and wire transfers, fraud traveled by mail, and today they still do. Schemes often involve letters, checks and shipments, giving prosecutors an easy hook.

Well-known cases involving mail fraud include:

• Barry Minkow — Sent fraudulent invoices, contracts and insurance-restoration documents through the mail to support a massive accounting fraud at ZZZZ Best.

• Leona Helmsley — Used mailed false invoices and tax-related documents in schemes involving fraudulent deductions and personal expenses disguised as business costs. Convicted on federal mail fraud and tax charges.

• Scott Rothstein (attorney) — Used mailed documents and settlment agreements to sustain a massive Ponzi scheme involving fictitious legal settlements.

• Lou Pearlman (Trans Continental) — Sent fraudulent financial statements and investment documents through the mail to keep his scheme alive.

The envelope looks ordinary. But it contains an easily charged crime.

Related Blunders:

• Criminal corporations

• CEO hubris

• Executive misconduct

• Ponzi schemes

• Hall of Shame

• Blunder history

• Biggest Blunders

• 30 Under 30 Curse

“We will frack, frack, frack, and drill baby drill. I will cut your energy prices in half within 12 months.” – President Donald Trump, Oct, 18 2024

Wall Street traders have cooked up a new Mexican delight. This time it’s NACHO instead of TACO.

TACO, an acronym for Trump Always Chickens Out, was Wall Street’s rationale for bidding stock indexes to record highs despite Trump’s wavering tariff threats.

NACHO is another call.

It stands for “Not A Chance Hormuz Opens,” a growing market wager that the Strait of Hormuz disruption is not a temporary panic but the beginning of a prolonged energy shock.

“NACHO is an acknowledgment that higher oil isn’t a temporary shock to trade around, it’s the current market environment,” one market analyst told CNBC.

President Donald Trump can keep prattling about winning the war, ending the war, opening the Strait, but Wall Street is now betting that the world is stuck with $100 oil for the foreseeable future.

Gas pump prices seem to be the one economic metric everyone understands. They directly impact household budgets and eventually raise the price of just about everything.

If there’s anything voters may still hold politicians accountable for, it’s gasoline prices.

That’s why Republicans have always loved to blame Democrats for higher gasoline prices, and indeed the the came under President Joe Biden.

On July 17, 2008, the national average hit $4.11. The causes included rising demand from China and other emerging economies, tight global supplies, a weak U.S. dollar, and heavy commodities speculation.

Then on June 14, 2022, it hit a new record of $5.02. The causes were Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rebounding post-pandemic demand.

Today we are at $4.53, the AAA reports, and a single cause is abundantly clear.

The Strait of Hormuz, where the world gets 20% of its oil, is closed because Trump unilaterally started a war with Iran that he can’t conclude on the time table he initially promised.

It’s already led to the loss of a billion barrels of oil production per day, it’s getting worse every day, it will take a long time to recover, Shell CEO Wael Sawan told investors on Thursday.

Trump loves to put his name on everything. So perhaps in November, voters may be tempted to call it what it is: Trumpflation.

We haven’t even begun the summer driving season yet, so all this Trumpflation is likely to drive gasoline prices higher still.

Trump is now he’s gunning for Biden’s.

Before Trump struck Iran, analysts were forecasting gasoline prices to average below $3 this year. Now it could be more like $5.

To be fair, these are nominal comparisons. In inflation-adjusted dollars, gasoline would have to rise above $6 to eclipse the pain of previous price shocks under Biden. But don’t rule that out. Pump prices are already averaging over $6 in California.

For many Americans, it may be best to stay home this summer. And eat a NACHO.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this post attributed the 2008 spike in oil prices came during President Barack Obama’s term. It came under president George W. Bush.

Fifty Shades of JPMorgan Chase

Someone at America’s largest bank is a freak.

It’s either Chirayu Rana, a former vice president at JPMorgan Chase, or it’s Lorna Hajdini, an executive director.

I needn’t list all the lurid details of this scandal because they are splashed all over everywhere – from viral social media posts and sketchy AI memes to the headlines in major newspapers, including the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal.

• Rana claims Hajdini drugged and raped him and basically tried to turn him into a sex slave.

• Hajdidni denies any sexual or romantic relationship, let alone this kind of smear.

• JPMorgan Chase says it has investigated Rana’s claims and found no evidence to support them, yet it offered him $1 million to quietly go away.

But Rana isn’t quietly going away. And for now the only certainty is that JPMorgan Chase has a major PR crisis on its hands.

The lines Rana says Hadjdini allegedly uttered are so damn freaky it’s difficult to believe a highly paid Wall Street executive would say them – or, in the alternative, fabricate them in a lawsuit for the entire scandal-loving world to dissect.

Or is it?

From Jeffrey Epstein to yet another Wall Street sex-capade, the people at the top of our economic system keep confusing their outsized wealth with immunity.

Read More: Banking On Epstein (Business Blunders)

Another banker behaving badly

An update on small-town bankster Danny Seibel, 55, who drove a century-old small-town bank to insolvency with reckless lending to friends, casino gambling and allegedly doctored books.

The former CEO of the failed First National Bank of Lindsay, Okla., pleaded guilty to a single count of bank fraud on Thursday. He faces up to 30 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million.

The bank had served its community of nearly 3,000 people since 1902 and once boasted $108 million until … him.

At least Seibel was smart enough to know that he was going down when he realized that he may have sent suspiciously conflicting reports to regulators.

Here’s what he texted another bank employee in June 2024, according to the indictment against him:

“I think I’m nailed to the wall now I [g]ave them a report that [is not] the same as what they got now and they have both. Nobody’s fault but my own. Also, delete these texts.”

Read More: Small Town Bankster (Business Blunders)

For your daily dose of What Not To Do In Business, join the Business Blunders community on: Substack – LinkedIn – Facebook – X

Don't Miss These Blunders

“Yes, I am the victim of a Basketball Jones.” – Tyrone Shoelaces

His name was Jones and he had a Basketball Jones.

Lester T. Jones, Jr. received three years and five months in prison this week for embezzling $3.7 million from the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks.

Prosecutors say he spent the money on the kind of stuff Americans apparently need to keep up with the Joneses: $80,000 in overseas travel; $99,800 in clothes at Saks Fifth Avenue; a $115,795 diamond ring; $21,888 in Omega watches, and more than $160,000 in tickets to concerts and other events.

Didn’t anyone notice him traveling so often and wearing gaudy baubles before the tab hit $3.7 million?

Probably not, because Jones, 46, was senior vice president of finance, second only to the chief financial officer. And he was the sole administrator of the Hawks’ corporate credit card account with American Express.

Jones ran up huge tabs and covered his tracks like only a senior finance executive knows how to do, according to a charging document to which he plead guilty in December.

Read more

Mohamed Hassan built a 20-pharmacy empire across Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

At 35, he’s now in Fort Dix serving 18 years for pushing oxycodone.

As a licensed pharmacist, Hassan built an impressive empire running pharmacies under names that included Nile RX, Nile Ridge, Nile City, Sunset Corner, Prospect Care, Downtown RX and Forest Care.

He kept a Brooklyn doctor busy churning out bogus scripts for 30 mg oxycodone tablets – the kind prescribed for end-stage cancer pain.

Runners posing as patients picked them up. Street dealers sold them for cash.

They sold more than 1.6 million pills that were worth more than $48 million on the street.

Supervising pharmacist Yousef Ennab, and other co-defendants, also received prison time or are awaiting their sentencing. At least they’re still alive. Some of their end-users have met their ends.

Oh, the outrage:

“The corrupt pharmacists who filled illegitimate oxycodone prescriptions to supply drug dealers, acted out of pure greed and complete disregard for the harm they were causing.” – Joseph Nocella, U.S. Attorney.

Hassan’s real blunder wasn’t illegally peddling pills. It was doing it without effective corporate protection.

Here’s how it works in the major leagues:

On Tuesday, a judge finally approved a criminal sentence for Purdue Pharma.

The Stamford, Conn.-based oxycodone maker had pleaded guilty to fraud and kickback conspiracies in 2020, but the case goes back further. In May 2007 the company and some of its executives pleaded guilty for misbranding its highly addictive and widely abused drug, OxyContin.

On Tuesday, Purdue Pharma was ordered to pay more than $5 billion for fueling an opioid crisis linked to more than 800,000 deaths in the U.S. since 1999.

Read More: The Outrageous Acts Of Criminally Charged Corporations (Blunder Lists)

Cue the outrage:

“Purdue Pharma put profits over patient health and safety. The company willfully rejected the law and ignored the diversion of their highly addictive prescription drugs.” – Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

But unlike Hassan’s enterprise, nobody at Purdue Pharma is going to prison.

And the Sackler family that ran this far more sophisticated, and far more deadly, syndicate will likely hold on to at least some of their billions, despite having to pay some onerous financial penalties over time.

Read more

Welcome to “This Day In Blunders,” a collection of the worst decisions, deceptions and dealings in American business history.

Here’s a link to the archive, which is organized in monthly sections:

This Day In Blunders

It may be more fun to enjoy these one day at a time. For your daily dose join the Business Blunders community on: Substack – LinkedIn – Facebook – X

Each item has a handy link to a primary document, historical accounting or contemporaneous news story for easy research.

Why am I bothering with all this?

First, it’s my personal reference file, helping me keep a historical perspective on today’s endless business blunders. And second …

Well, I suppose Bob Marley sang it most succinctly: “Don’t know your past, don’t know your future.”

People forget about the past when navigating their careers, their investments, their purchases and their lives in general. How else can they remain optimists?

Granted, it’s no fun being a cynic, but you don’t want to be a rube or dupe, either.

“This Day In Blunders” servers as a daily reminder of all that could go horribly wrong.

You may have noticed pieces of it already in my Substack Notes and social media feeds. It’s a lot to muddle through all at once, yet fun to explore a day at a time.

Some of these posts take us back more than a century. Like this one about the NYSE president who stole from widows and orphans … literally:

Read More: Richard Whitney – New York Stock Exchange (Business Blunders Hall Of Shame)

When I started this project, I thought it might be difficult to find a cautionary tale for each day of the year. But no. This folly goes back a long way, and it goes on all the time.

History shows that incompetence, ignorance, fraud deception, and corporate skullduggery are baked into our economic system.

On the plus side, we have checks and balances, and the system is large enough to overcome its worst elements – assuming your investments are properly diversified. But we must remain wary of those who would roll over anybody in their relentless pursuits of wealth and power.

I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions on this effort:

Leave a comment

I’ve been covering business blunders my entire career as a financial journalist, yet in pursuing this project I marveled at how many of these travesties that even I had forgotten.

Always remember: Human nature never changes, and wherever there’s a big pot of money, there’s always somebody trying to pinch it.

Thanks for reading.

This Day In Blunders

January: This Day In Blunders

February: This Day In Blunders

March: This Day In Blunders

April: This Day In Blunders

May: This Day In Blunders

June: This Day In Blunders

July: This Day In Blunders

August: This Day In Blunders

September: This Day In Blunders

October: This Day In Blunders

November: This Day In Blunders

December: This Day In Blunders

FEBRUARY >

Jan. 1

Jos. Schlitz Brewing Co. — Product Failure (1976)

Robert Uihlein ordered Jos. Schlitz Brewing Co. to replace a key brewing stabilizer with a cheaper substitute called Chill-Garde. The shortcut reduced costs but destroyed quality. It triggered a massive recall over haze and spoilage, and it helped turn a top-selling beer into a brand consumers abandoned.

Jan. 2

Standard Oil — Regulatory Action (1882)

John D. Rockefeller and his partners created the Standard Oil Trust, consolidating dozens of companies into a single entity that dominated the oil industry by crushing competitors and controlling prices. The oil giant eventually triggered an antitrust crackdown that ultimately broke it apart.

Saks Global — CEO Resignation (2026)

Saks Global CEO Marc Metrick stepped down as the luxury retailer faced mounting debt and reports it was preparing for bankruptcy. The parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus named Executive Chairman Richard Baker as his successor, just days after reports it had missed a debt payment tied to its merger. Read More: Sacking Saks (Business Blunders)

Jan. 3

Home Depot — CEO Resignation (2007)

Bob Nardelli resigned as CEO of Home Depot after losing market share, alienating executives, and drawing backlash over his pay. He focused on cost-cutting over customer servic while collecting a massive compensation package despite weak results.

Theranos — Fraud Conviction (2022)

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted on multiple counts of fraud for misleading investors about the company’s blood-testing technology. Her Silicon Valley fairy tale built on hype and secrecy collapsed when the science didn’t match the story. She was later sentenced to more than 11 years in prison. Read More: ElizabethHolmes – Theranos (Business Blunders Hall Of Shame)

Jan. 4

Service Merchandise — Bankruptcy (2002)

Service Merchandise announced it was going out of business after a second bankruptcy filing. A catalog showroom model built for another era couldn’t survive the shift to big-box stores and online retail.

BlackBerry — Product Shutdown (2022)

BlackBerry shut down its legacy services, rendering its once-ubiquitous smartphones largely unusable. A pioneer of the mobile era failed to keep up with the touchscreen revolution and faded into obsolescence.

Rick Singer — Sentencing (2023)

College admissions consultant Rick Singer was sentenced to 3½ years in prison for masterminding the sprawling “Varsity Blues” admissions scandal. Singer pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction of justice after prosecutors said he coordinated bribes, fake athletic credentials and sham charitable payments to help wealthy clients secure spots at elite universities.

Jan. 5

Boeing — Operational Failure (2024)

A door plug blew out mid-flight on an Alaska Airlines jet, prompting regulators to ground Boeing’s 737 MAX 9 fleet. The incident reignited scrutiny of Boeing’s safety and quality controls. Read More: Con Air (Business Blunders)

Jan. 6

Bank of New England — Collapse (1991)

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Regulators seized Bank of New England, one of the largest bank failures of its time, after mounting loan losses crippled the institution. Aggressive lending and weak oversight left the bank exposed when the economy turned.

Lyondell Chemical — Bankruptcy (2009)

Lyondell Chemical Co. and several affiliates filed bankruptcy under a mountain of debt from a leveraged buyout. A heavily leveraged deal left the company exposed and when the downturn hit, the balance sheet buckled.

Jan. 7

Satyam Computer Services — Accounting Scandal (2009)

B. Ramalinga Raju resigned from Satyam Computer Services and confessed to inflating cash balances and falsifying accounts by more than $1.5 billion, or roughly 7,000 crore rupees. The massive fraud earned the company the nickname “India’s Enron.”

Boeing — Criminal Charges (2021)

Boeing was charged with conspiracy to defraud regulators over two deadly 737 MAX crashed and entered a deferred prosecution agreement with more than $2.5 billion in penalties and compensation. The charge was dismissed in November 2025 under the Trump administration. Read More: Felons Fly Free (Business Blunders)

Ted Farnsworth — Guilty Plea (2025)

Ted Farnsworth, former CEO of MoviePass parent Helios and Matheson Analytics, pleaded guilty to securities fraud for misleading investors about the company’s finances and business prospects. MoviePass grew wildly with an irresistible subscription service for moviegoers. For less than $10 a month, they got a ticket to see a movie a day. Too good to be true? Yes, it was. Read More: Ted Farnsworth – Movie Pass (Business Blunders Hall Of Shame)

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Jan. 8

Pan Am — Bankruptcy (1991)

Pan American World Airways filed bankruptcy as losses mounted and its survival prospects dimmed. The once-iconic airline never recovered, shutting down later that year.

Bear Stearns — CEO Resignation (2008)

James Cayne resigned as CEO of Bear Stearns after massive losses on mortgage-backed securities pushed the firm into crisis. A heavy bet on subprime lending unraveled, foreshadowing the bank’s collapse just months later.

Jan. 9

Kidder, Peabody & Co. — Fraud Charges (1996)

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges against Joseph Jett for generating $340 million in phony profits at Kidder, Peabody & Co. through fraudulent trading. He was later barred from the securities industry, though no criminal charges were filed.

U.S. Economy — Job Loss (2009)

The U.S. Department of Labor reported that the nation lost about 1.9 million jobs in the last four months of 2008, the worst annual decline in decades. Companies slashed payrolls as the financial crisis rippled through the economy.

Jan. 10

AOL / Time Warner — Acquisition Blunder (2000)

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America Online and Time Warner announced a $182 billion deal, forming AOL Time Warner in the largest merger in corporate history at the time. The blockbuster bet on internet hype over old media synergies became one of the worst deals in M&A history.

Target — Data Breach (2014)

Target revealed its holiday data breach was far worse than first reported, exposing the personal information of up to 70 million customers. The company said names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses were taken, dramatically expanding the scope of one of the largest retail hacks in U.S. history.

Jan. 11

Volkswagen — Guilty Plea (2017)

Volkswagen agreed to plead guilty and pay $4.3 billion in criminal and civil penalties in the U.S. diesel-emissions fraud case. The company rigged millions of cars to cheat emissions tests—turning “clean diesel” into one of the biggest corporate frauds in automotive history. Read More: The Outrageous Acts Of Criminally Charged Corporations (Blunder Lists)

eBay — Criminal Settlement (2024)

eBay Inc. agreed to pay a $3 million criminal penalty in connection with a corporate cyberstalking campaign carried out by its employees against critics. Executives tried to silence a newsletter with harassment and intimidation, turning a PR problem into a criminal case. Read More: The Outrageous Acts Of Criminally Charged Corporations (Blunder Lists)

Jan. 12

Alcoa — Financial Loss (2009)

Alcoa reported a then-staggering $1.2 billion quarterly loss, an early warning of how badly industrial giants had misjudged demand during the financial crisis. Orders collapsed, prices plunged, and the downturn hit faster than companies expected.

STG Logistics — Bankruptcy (2026)

STG Logistics filed bankruptcy after debt and operational issues drained its liquidity. A leveraged balance sheet and execution problems left the freight hauler short of cash.

Jan. 13

Takata — Guilty Plea (2017)

Takata agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud and pay $1 billion in criminal penalties for concealing defects in its airbag inflators. Faulty airbags tied to dozens of deaths became one of the largest safety recalls in automotive history. Read More: The Outrageous Acts Of Criminally Charged Corporations (Blunder Lists)

Jan. 14

Enron — Guilty Plea (2004)

Enron’s former chief financial officer Andrew Fastow, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and securities fraud. He agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, forfeit more than $23 million, and serve a 10-year sentence for his role in the scheme. Read More: Enron Was A Parody Of Itself (Business Blunders)

Saks Global — Bankruptcy (2026)

Saks Global filed bankruptcy as heavy debt and weak performance strained the business. A highly leveraged bet on iconic luxury retailers unraveled as department stores lost their appeal. Read More: Sacking Saks (Business Blunders)

Jan. 15

Federated Department Stores — Bankruptcy (1990)

Federated Department Stores filed bankruptcy, one of the largest retail failures in U.S. history at the time. Canadian real estate developer Robert Campeau buried the retailer with debt with his leveraged buyouts. The debt-fueled takeover spree left the retailer unable to pay its bills when the economy turned.

Google — Product Failure (2015)

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Google halted consumer sales of Google Glass after privacy concerns, high costs, and weak demand sank the high-profile gadget. A hyped wearable flopped as privacy fears and limited use turned early adopters into skeptics. Read More: The Biggest Business Blunders Of All Time (Blunder Lists)

Joann Inc. — Bankruptcy (2025)

Joann Inc. filed bankruptcy for the second time in a year. A brief trip through bankruptcy wasn’t enough for the fabric and crafts retailer. Weak sales and heavy debt dragged the retailer back under.

Jan. 16

Bank of America — Bailout (2009)

The Treasury announced it would invest an additional $20 billion in Bank of America as losses tied to the Merrill Lynch acquisition mounted during the financial crisis. A rushed deal saddled the bank with toxic assets, forcing taxpayers to step in and stabilize the damage.

Circuit City — Shutdown (2009)

Circuit City announced it would liquidate and close all 567 U.S. stores. The big-box pioneer failed to keep pace with rivals and changing consumer habits, turning a once-dominant chain into a retail casualty.

Jan. 17

Party City — Bankruptcy (2023)

Party City filed its first bankruptcy and began closing hundreds for corporately owned stores. The retailer was already buried in debt as the Covid-19 pandemic ended most festivities.

Jan. 18

Eastern Air Lines — Shutdown (1991)

Eastern Air Lines shut down after 64 years of service following a prolonged bankruptcy. Labor strife, heavy debt, and mismanagement grounded one of America’s largest airlines for good.

Jack in the Box — Fast Food Disaster (1993)

An E. Coli outbreak was traced to undercooked hamburgers at Jack In The Box. Hundreds were sickened. Four died. Sweeping fast-food industry changes followed.

Pets.com — Shutdown (2001)

Pets.com completed its liquidation after burning through cash just months after its initial public stock offering. The company spent heavily on marketing and sold pet supplies at a loss, becoming a symbol of dot-com excess when the business model never added up.

HSBC — Settlement (2020)

HSBC Holdings agreed to pay more than $100 million to resolve fraud charges over a scheme to manipulate foreign exchange trades for its own benefit. The bank used inside knowledge of client trades to tilt the market in its favor. Read More: The Outrageous Acts Of Criminally Charged Corporations (Blunder Lists)

Jan. 19

Eastman Kodak — Bankruptcy (2012)

Eastman Kodak filed bankruptcy after failing to pivot from film to digital photography. The company had invented the digital camera, but couldn’t give up on its Kodachrome, falling behind as technology moved on. Read More: The Biggest Business Blunders Of All Time (Blunder Lists)

Megaupload — Shutdown (2012)

U.S. authorities shut down Megaupload after its leaders, including Kim Dotcom, were indicted on charges of widespread copyright infringement. The wildly popular site built a business on pirated content until the government pulled the plug.

Jan. 20

Marc Rich — Legal Action (2001)

President Bill Clinton pardoned former Glencore CEO Marc Rich, who violated U.S. trade sanctions, evaded taxes and lived in Switzerland as a fugitive for 18 years. Read More: Marc Rich – Glencore (Business Blunders Hall Of Shame)

Heartland Payment Systems — Breach (2009)

Heartland Payment Systems disclosed one of the largest data breaches at the time, exposing millions of credit card numbers. The stolen data fueled widespread fraud and highlighted systemic vulnerabilities in payment processing.

Jan. 21

General Motors — Market Loss (2009)

General Motors officially lost its the title as the world’s largest automaker to Toyota, after years of market share decline and mismanagement. GM announced worldwide sales of 8.36 million cars and trucks in 2008 compared with Toyota’s 8.97 million vehicle sales that same year.

Jan. 22

Kmart — Bankruptcy (2002)

Kmart filed bankruptcy as it suffered high debt, poor holiday sales and competitive pressures from Target and Walmart. It then the largest retail bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Research In Motion — CEO Resignation (2012)

Mike Lazaridis stepped down as co-CEO of Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry, as its smartphone dominance eroded. A pioneer of the mobile era failed to keep up with the touchscreen revolution and lost its lead.

Jan. 23

Serta Simmons Bedding — Bankruptcy (2023)

Serta Simmons Bedding filed bankruptcy, saddled with billons in debt from a 2016 private-equity buyout.

Jan. 24

Société Générale — Fraud Discovery (2008)

French banking giant Société Générale accused a junior employee, Jerome Kerviel, of the biggest rogue trader scandal in history hit, a fraud costing $7 billion.

Jan. 25

J. Clifford Baxter — Death (2002)

Enron executive J. Clifford Baxter took his own life after agreeing to testify before Congress.

JCPenney — Product Failure (2012)

JC Penney unveiled a sweeping “transformation” under CEO Ron Johnson, the former Apple retail chief. He scrapped coupons and sales for everyday low pricing and launched a boutique-style store overhaul. The moves alienating core customers, crushing sales, and triggering one of retail’s most infamous retail blunders ever. Read More: The Biggest Business Blunders Of All Time (Blunder Lists)

Albert Dunlap — Executive Death (2019)

Albert J. Dunlap, the hard-charging CEO known as “Chainsaw Al,” died at 81. He built a reputation on mass layoffs and cost-cutting, then left behind a legacy tarnished by accounting scandal and a massive shareholder settlement after the collapse of Sunbeam.

Jan. 26

Bed Bath & Beyond — Financial Distress (2023)

Bed Bath & Beyond announced that banks had cut its credit line following too many over-advances, a critical blow that accelerated the retail chain’s collapse.

Jan. 27

GameStop — Market Spike (2021)

GameStop hit its highest closing price, soaring about 1,940% from the beginning of that month. Today, the meme stock is still down to a fraction of its peak.

Jan. 28

Global Crossing — Bankruptcy (2002)

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Global Crossing filed what was then the fourth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history and the largest-ever in the telecommunications sector. Read More: A Dead Billionaire Defaults (Business Blunders)

Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing — FTC Shutdown (2013)

The Federal Trade Commission and multiple state regulators shut down Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing, alleging the company operated an illegal pyramid scheme disguised as a telecom and utility marketing business. Regulators said participants were paid mainly for recruiting new members rather than selling actual services. More than 100,000 consumers were pulled into the scheme.

Huawei Vs. T-Mobile – Intellectual Property Case (2019)

Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment accusing Huawei of conspiring to steal trade secrets from T-Mobile involving “Tappy,” a robotic device used to test smartphone durability and performance. Prosecutors alleged Huawei employees secretly photographed, measured and attempted to remove parts of the robot while violating confidentiality agreements with the wireless carrier. In a related civil case, a Seattle jury found Huawei had misappropriated trade-secret-related information and awarded T-Mobile $4.8 million in damages, though the jury stopped short of finding willful and malicious theft.

Jan. 29

American International Group — Settlement (2008)

Greg Abbott, then Texas Attorney General, announced a settlement with American International Group over bid-rigging allegations. The insurer steered business through sham bids to create the illusion of competition—undermining a market built on trust.

BP — Criminal Settlement (2013)

BP Exploration and Production Inc. pleaded guilty and was sentenced to pay $4 billion in criminal fines and penalties for its 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. Read More: The Biggest Business Blunders Of All Time (Blunder Lists)

Pacific Gas & Electric — Bankruptcy (2019)

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. filed bankruptcy after amassing liabilities from a series of catastrophic wildfires in 2017 and 2018. Read More: The Outrageous Acts Of Criminally Charged Corporations (Blunder Lists)

Jan. 30

American Freedom Mortgage — Bankruptcy (2007)

Subprime mortgage lender American Freedom Mortgage filed bankruptcy, an early warning sign in the subprime mortgage crisis that led to the nations’ economic collapse in 2008.

Metropolitan Capital Bank & Trust — Collapse (2026)

Metropolitan Capital Bank & Trust became the first U.S. bank failure of the year when Illinois regulators closed it over unsafe and unsound conditions and an impaired capital position. The Chicago bank had about $261.1 million in assets.

Jan. 31

Trans World Airlines — Bankruptcy (1992)

Trans World Airlines filed bankruptcy after years of financial mismanagement, debt problems, and controversial asset sales under corporate raider Carl Icahn.

Russell Wasendorf Sr. — Fraud Sentencing (2013)

Russell Wasendorf Sr., founder of Peregrine Financial Group, was sentenced to 50 years in prison after pleading guilty to embezzling more than $215 million from clients over two decades. A 20-year fraud built on fake bank records collapsed—costing clients hundreds of millions.

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Related Blunders:

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• Hall of Shame