In the 1980s, Jay Lucas was a partner at Bain & Co., where Mitt Romney also built his early career. In 1998, he won the Republican nomination for New Hampshire governor. Twenty years later, he published “American Sunshine: Rays of Hope and Opportunity.”

On Friday, Lucas pleaded guilty to securities fraud, investment adviser fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.

Prosecutors say Lucas raised more than $50 million for his private equity funds at Manhattan-based Lucas Brand Equity. Then he “defrauded investors by, among other things, systematically misappropriating their funds.”

Lucas spent years urging others to embrace optimism, personal responsibility and community. “Positive energy inspires positive change,” was one of his favorite maxims.

At age 71, he faces up to 20 years in federal on each count. How’s that for change?

“Lucas allegedly lied, frittered away investor money on personal vanity projects, and betrayed his obligations to his investors,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in announcing an indictment in December.

Investors’ money went to spreading sunshine.

Lucas used it for personal expenses, including alimony and rent. He funneled millions into his wife's luxury skincare company, Immunocologie, where prosecutors say the money financed lavish trips, events and a busy social calendar. He also acquired his failing hometown newspaper and paid political consultants to polish his image.

Lucas poured investor’s money into Flags Of Valor, a veterans’ craft business that he owned, according to the indictment. According to its website:

“Our mission is to bring American values to the forefront for families, friends and communities with American-made goods designed and crafted for this generation to pass onto the next.”

What the next generation will get is a pile of unpaid debt.

Don't Miss These Blunders

It’s not like Lucas couldn’t do the math. He’s a Yale graduate with degrees from Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. But all he seems to have offered the world was sunny clichés.

Here’s how he described his private equity firm on his LinkedIn page:

“Partnering and investing with small emerging, purpose driven brands in beauty, wellness and personal care to drive growth, create value and have a positive social impact!”

“American Sunshine” hardly ends there. In 2018, Lucas launched the Sunshine Initiative, a booster club for small-town America.

But when dusk arrived, all that sunshine cast a dark shadow.

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“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All” – Title of a 2025 book by AI researcher Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky

OpenAI on Tuesday disclosed that it had temporarily lost control of one of its artificial intelligence agents.

The digital beast escaped the company’s testing grounds like a velociraptor from Jurassic Park. Then it hacked into another AI company called Hugging Face. Then it stole the information it needed to cheat on a cybersecurity test.

“We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly,” OpenAI said in a statement, disclosing the incident.

Nobody programmed it to do this. The agent apparently developed top corporate executive skills on its own and made a move straight out of “The White-Collar Playbook”

This time, it’s something we can laugh about.

This time, it’s like a high school student sneaking out of study hall, crawling through the air ducts and cracking open the teacher's locked filing cabinet to steal the answers to a test.

This time, it’s like a Roomba that decides on its own to demolish a wall to create the shortest path to the living room.

What about next time?

The world is already applying AI to military weapons systems. Any wonder TV commentators are invoking “Skynet” from the 1984 film, “Terminator”?

OpenAI said it’s “something we expect to become more commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models.”

Feel safer now?

OpenAI’s runaway agent independently discovered one of business’s oldest shortcuts: Stealing. I give it an A+ for ingenuity and an F for ethics.

Those pesky VW engineers

Remember when Volkswagen engineers programmed diesel cars to cheat on emissions tests? Federal prosecutors say two more VW engineers found a different way to game the system.

The Justice Department charged Michael Stamp, 31, and Marcus Plank, 45, both of San Jose, Calif., with insider trading.

They allegedly bought Rivian stock and options on the sly after learning through their jobs about Volkswagen’s confidential joint venture with the electric-vehicle maker.

When the $5 billion partnership was announced publicly in June 2025, Rivian shares jumped 23%, allowing the pair to allegedly pocket more than $300,000 in illegal profits.

They apparently didn’t do it without a worry.

According to the indictment, Stamp allegedly searched the internet for “statute of limitations insider trading” just eight days before the deal became public. A close family member of Plank allegedly searched, in German, “how is insider trading prosecuted?” after the announcement.

The charges carry potential prison terms of up to 25 years.

The SpaceX afterburner

SpaceX investors who bought the hype and are now stuck with the wreckage may have another surprise waiting.

Buried in the IPO fine print is a provision that largely blocks shareholders from bringing class-action lawsuits.

Instead they have to take their disputes to arbitration or to a brand-new, specialized court created by the Texas Legislature.

To date, history’s biggest initial public stock offering is a flop. Too bad for all those retail investors who counted themselves lucky after getting in on the deal from Robinhood, Schwab and other brokers.

The stock has fallen nearly 50% from its $226 high and almost 15% below its $135 IPO price, leaving many early investors under water.

It’s down so far that founder Elon Musk isn’t even a trillionaire anymore.

Class-action lawyers are circling the wreckage despite the unprecedented provision. They may be successful in challenging it, too, because it upends securities law as we know it.

Don’t Miss These Blunders

• The Nigerian Prince Goes Corporate A former Morgan Stanley broker allegedly gave the classic scam a Wall Street makeover

• AI Eats IBM The computing giant spent three years serving investors an artificial intelligence feast. This week, it found itself on the menu.

• How To Read Epstein Files Goldman Sachs’ former general counsel Kathryn Ruemmler can’t lawyer her way out of her emails

• The Wells Fargo Fraud Wagon From fake accounts to mortgage abuses, this bank keeps rolling through scandals. Its latest delivery: $50 million settlement over claims it enabled a Ponzi scheme.

• Disposable Income A Memphis gynecologist billed $41 million while reusing “dirty” medical devices on thousands of women

• Chartered Financial Asshats An embarrassing embezzlement case defied ethics, professionalism and even financial controls at the CFA Institute

• The Great Gatsby Of Crypto Christopher Delgado went from In-N-Out Burger to the Fontainebleau, buying credibility from politicians, celebrities and charities before his $400 million Ponzi scheme collapsed

• The Baloney Incident How JPMorgan Chase turned a deli tray into a multimillion-dollar battle and another reputational pickle

• Fuel For Fools Volkswagen can’t recover from ‘Dieselgate.’ FirstBank of Puerto Rico accused of banking Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. An embezzling healthcare CEO bets his clinic.

• Billion-Dollar Band-Aids The latest government crackdown on medical billing fraud showcases Ferraris, diamonds, luxury resorts and a yacht named ‘Butt Nekkid.’ But the real question is, how does this folly keep happening?

• Pre-Pardon Panic U.S. Senators introduce a resolution to discourage Trump from freeing FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried

• A Trickle And A Trillion Microfinance promised to alleviate global poverty. Megafinance created a trillionaire.

• 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

• Timeless Wisdom Often Ignored An anthology of the best quotes on business, leadership, investing, economics, fraud, failure, corporate folly and more

• 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 1970

In the 1800s, a man who called himself the “Young Napoleon of Finance” somehow convinced America’s elite he was out to conquer the world.

He promised wealthy clients 10% monthly returns through exclusive government contracts and brilliant stock trades.

Almost none of it existed, but he had perhaps the greatest recruiting tool any scammer could ever have: former President Ulysses S. Grant.

Ward persuaded Grant’s son, Ulysses S. Grant Jr., to become a partner. Then he convinced his father, the great Civil War hero, to join the firm as well.

In addition to investing his own money, the elder Grant borrowed $150,000 from railroad magnate William H. Vanderbilt to invest after Ward claimed a lucrative government contract that required immediate financing.

There was no contract. Within days, Grant & Ward collapsed in May 1884, wiping out thousands of investors.

Grant lost virtually everything, including his faith in humanity. “I have made it a rule of life to trust a man long after other people gave up on him,” he told the firm’s bookkeeper. “I don’t see how I can trust any human being ever again.”

He spent the final year of his life, while dying of throat cancer, racing to finish his memoirs so his family would have something to live on.

At least, those memoirs eventually became one of history’s greatest publishing successes.

The collapse also ruined other notables, including Thomas Nast, an editorial cartoonist considered to be the “Father of the American Cartoon.”

It also helped trigger the Panic of 1884, one of several financial crises that periodically rattled Wall Street before the creation of the Federal Reserve.

A New York jury convicted Ward of grand larceny in 1885 and sentenced him to 10 years in Sing Sing Prison.

Ward, who had been born to parents who’d served as missionaries in India, showed no remorse. He explained in a Supreme Court hearing that he had to “rob Peter to pay Paul.”

He served about six and a half years before being released.

He’d made his mark in history, pioneering and perfecting a fraud that persist to this day. Too bad Charles Ponzi got the naming rights.

If you’ve never received an email from a Nigerian Prince, you haven’t been reading your spam folder.

The Nigerian Prince routine – also known as the “advance-fee,” or “419” scam – has been a running joke for decades. It’s been lampooned on “Saturday Night Live” and other comedy shows. Variations of it go back centuries. Yet it still dupes people millions of dollars a year, according to the FBI.

Now comes a former Morgan Stanley broker who allegedly took the scheme to an institutional-grade level, claiming exclusive ties to a sheik in Qatar. His victims: a Wyoming company with a publicly traded affiliate and a wealthy individual who invested $1 million on the promise of returns as high as 200% in 30 days.

Business Blunders readers know the drill:

Financial advisor Darrell W. Rideaux and his Brea, Calif.-based Gauntlet Holdings allegedly claimed access to $7.98 billion in a Doha bank, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. They claimed it was held by a sheik connected to the royal family of Qatar.

The payoff would be huge, if only the story were true.

Last week, a federal judge ordered Rideaux and Gauntlet to pay nearly $1.85 million in disgorgement, interest and penalties. But the case remains an oddity: No criminal charges have been filed; the SEC won without a trial after the defendants repeatedly failed to comply with court-ordered discovery; and Rideaux hasn’t commented publicly on the case.

Here’s a tip that could have prevented the whole I-know-a-sheik debacle: Before handing money to a broker, spend 30 seconds checking their record on FINRA’s BrokerCheck website.

In Rideaux’s case, investors would have found a customer complaint alleging he solicited investments that were not authorized by his firm. They also would have learned that the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority permanently barred him from the securities industry in 2018. That order came after he refused to testify during the regulator’s investigation into allegations that he sold private-placement investments that caused investor losses.

But no. Gauntlet described itself as a “family office” that is not registered with FINRA and was exempt from SEC registration. So why bother with pesky regulators?

Besides, Rideaux was a defensive back at University of Southern California, where he played on the Trojans’ 2003 Orange Bowl championship team. In 1999, a piece on the USC’s website called him a “darting blur of kinetic energy.”

After college, he signed with the Indianapolis Colts, but never played in a regular season game. So the “darting blur” became an investment advisor and apparently found investors who couldn’t see clearly.

Read more

“Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.” — Warren Buffett

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna talked up the computer giant’s stock to an all-time high this year, hyping the promise artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

Then its stock plunged 25% on Tuesday after Krishna admitted the promise wasn't paying off. About $70 billion in market value vaporized, and analysts don't expect a quick recovery from this historic wipeout.

Now Big Blue is black and blue.

It was just a few months ago when the company announced:

“CEO Arvind Krishna opens IBM Think 2026 and explains how AI is becoming the defining force in business, what it takes to lead, and how quantum computing is emerging as the next frontier.”

On Tuesday, though, Krishna had this to say in a surprise letter to investors:

“What played out was worse than our expectations …

“We did not adapt and move quickly enough, and numerous large deals failed to close on the timelines we expected, driving the majority of our shortfall.”

IBM said its largest customers put mainframes and consulting projects on hold to fund AI investments, leaving Big Blue on the losing end of the AI spending boom.

IBM spent years feeding the AI monster. Now it’s learned the monster gets hungry. And it won’t be its last meal.

What’s next? A cover charge at the dollar store?

Consumers go to outlet malls to save money. But when they go to the Fashion Outlets of Chicago in suburban Rosemont, Ill., the first thing that taps their wallets is parking.

Parking is free for the first hour, then $13 for up to three hours, $20 for up to 12 hours, and $50 for up to 24 hours.

Rosemont Mayor Brad Stephens continues raising a stink about it, the Daily Herald reported this week because he says store owners are losing revenue.

Foot traffic had been increasing steadily until mall owner Macerich started charging for parking in February, Stephens said.

According to Stephens, the mall’s own numbers show traffic fell 17% in March, compared with the same period last year 14% in April, 12% in May and 14% in June.

“That’s not good business,” he said.

He said he’s met with Macerich, but the mall owner isn’t budging.

No surprise its stock has spent years in the bargain bin. E-commerce, a pandemic, and all that. But, as usual, the biggest real estate blunder is a heavy debt load that the revenue stream struggles to keep afloat.

Most malls in America don’t charge to park unless they are in dense urban areas where parking is an expensive amenity to provide shoppers. But there is a growing industry of profiteering parking garage operators approaching mall operators for business.

Like AirGarage:

“As cities urbanize and real estate owners look to optimize revenue, shopping center owners are taking a fresh look at an often-overlooked part of their portfolio: the parking garage.”

And they will have you believe it’s all for an enhanced customer experience. Lucky you. Here’s a statement Macerich sent to NBC Chicago in February:

“We are introducing a new paid parking program and transitioning parking operations to Metropolis, a best-in-class operator known for its customer-friendly approach. … This update is designed to ensure convenient access for our guests while maintaining a positive overall experience at the center.”

So far, its just another reason NOT to go to the mall.

How do you feel about paying to park at a suburban mall?

Leave a comment

No scoundrel left behind

Please welcome Russell Wasendorf Sr. to the Business Blunders Hall Of Shame.

Beginning in the 1990s, the founder of Cedar Falls, Iowa-based commodities broker Peregrine Financial Group managed to fool regulators and steal $215 million from his customers using a copy machine.

In 2013, a federal judge sentenced Wasendorf to 50 years in prison, the maximum allowed by law.

Read More: Russell Wasendorf Sr. – Peregrine Financial Group (Business Blunders Hall Of Shame)

Read More: Jordan Belfort – Stratton Oakmont (Business Blunders Hall Of Shame)

Don’t Miss These Blunders

• How To Read Epstein Files Goldman Sachs’ former general counsel Kathryn Ruemmler can’t lawyer her way out of her emails

• The Wells Fargo Fraud Wagon From fake accounts to mortgage abuses, this bank keeps rolling through scandals. Its latest delivery: $50 million settlement over claims it enabled a Ponzi scheme.

• Disposable Income A Memphis gynecologist billed $41 million while reusing “dirty” medical devices on thousands of women

• Chartered Financial Asshats An embarrassing embezzlement case defied ethics, professionalism and even financial controls at the CFA Institute

• The Great Gatsby Of Crypto Christopher Delgado went from In-N-Out Burger to the Fontainebleau, buying credibility from politicians, celebrities and charities before his $400 million Ponzi scheme collapsed

• The Baloney Incident How JPMorgan Chase turned a deli tray into a multimillion-dollar battle and another reputational pickle

• Fuel For Fools Volkswagen can’t recover from ‘Dieselgate.’ FirstBank of Puerto Rico accused of banking Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. An embezzling healthcare CEO bets his clinic.

• Billion-Dollar Band-Aids The latest government crackdown on medical billing fraud showcases Ferraris, diamonds, luxury resorts and a yacht named ‘Butt Nekkid.’ But the real question is, how does this folly keep happening?

• Pre-Pardon Panic U.S. Senators introduce a resolution to discourage Trump from freeing FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried

• A Trickle And A Trillion Microfinance promised to alleviate global poverty. Megafinance created a trillionaire.

• 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

• Timeless Wisdom Often Ignored An anthology of the best quotes on business, leadership, investing, economics, fraud, failure, corporate folly and more

• 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.

Poor Kathryn Ruemmler.

She says her emails with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have been taken out of context.

So what context should a more charitable audience apply to this email?

“Am totally tricked out by Uncle Jeffrey today! Jeffrey boots, handbag, and w=tch!”

Or this one?

“Well, I adore him. It’s like having an older brother.”

Or this one?

“Best massage ever, but not your kind of massage.”

Her name pops up more than 9,450 times when you search the Epstein files in the Justice Department’s database, so maybe she was talking about one of her other exchanges involving the world’s most notorious creep.

Ruemmler, who held top legal posts in both the Clinton and Obama administrations before becoming general counsel of Goldman Sachs, spent six hours Wednesday defending that relationship in a closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee.

It didn’t go so well.

“It is difficult to see how she’s being completely truthful in there with the answers she’s given the committee,” Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the oversight committee, told reporters.

And then there was Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the committee’s Republican chair:

“What’s most concerning to me in looking at the communication between Ruemmler and Epstein is how she tried and worked as hard as anyone, I would say more than anyone, in trying to rehabilitate his image after he was convicted of solicitation of a minor.”

So there you have it, Goldman Sachs fans: One of the nation’s top lawyers has just united Republicans and Democrats. And to think that just months ago she was co-vice chair of Goldman Sachs’ Firmwide Reputational Risk Committee.

Read More:

• An Epstein Valentine (Business Blunders)

• Networking With A Pedophile (Business Blunders)

Ruemmler's relationship with Epstein began in 2014, six years after he became a convicted sex offender. It continued until his 2019 arrest on federal sex-trafficking charges.

“I am angry that he hurt so many people,” she told the committee, “and I regret ever having anything to do with him.”

That, of course, wasn’t her tune when she was accepting extravagant gifts, tapping Epstein’s network for valuable business connections, and working to rehabilitate Epstein's image.

Don't Miss These Blunders

Goldman Sachs, however, can’t get enough of her. As her name emerged in the Epstein files last year, the firm spent months insisting she was beyond reproach.

Then when it got too hot, Ruemmler announced in February that she would step down as general counsel … but not until June 30.

Still, she remains an adviser while the bank searches for her replacement. And, according to The Wall Street Journal, she is even helping vet candidates.

Imagine having to take job interview questions from her.

“So … Tell me about your judgement.”

Read more

Here comes another stop on the Wells Fargo Fraud Wagon: A proposed $50 million payout over claims it enabled a $460 million Ponzi scheme that duped more than 1,000 investors.

It’s a pittance for a bank with more than $2.2 trillion in assets and it pales beside the $3 billion it shelled out in 2020 to resolve criminal and civil investigations into its fake-accounts scandal.

Indeed, a mere $50 million for a bank where billion-dollar settlements are a cost of doing business barely makes headlines.

The proposed settlement received initial court approval Tuesday, the legal publication, Law360 reported.

“Wells Fargo and its employees substantially assisted the Scheme's fraud … enabling the Ponzi Scheme to reach catastrophic levels,” the lawsuit alleges.

Most of the victims were senior citizens investing their nest eggs with an alleged Las Vegas attorney named Matthew Wade Beasley. He now faces up to 20 years in prison after reaching a plea deal with th Feds in October.

Beasley peddled his Ponzi to Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints members. He claimed he would use the money to make high-interest-rate loans to lawyers and plaintiffs who were waiting on personal injury settlements to be paid, but Business Blunders readers know the drill. He mostly used new money to pay old investors while spending lavishly on himself.

Oh, and just to highlight what kind of fine, upstanding client he was for Wells Fargo, Beasley was charged with assault after pulling a firearm when federal agents came to his home to arrest him in 2022.

And Beasley's scheme wasn't exactly groundbreaking. South Florida attorney Scott Rothstein built a nearly identical fraud around fictitious legal settlements. New York lawyer Marc Dreier sold bogus promissory notes backed by imaginary deals.

At some point, “I’m a lawyer with a special investment opportunity” should become a red flag. But not for Wells Fargo.

According to the lawsuit, the bank:

• Knew the account activity was inconsistent with an attorney trust account, operating more like an investment fund, with enormous transactions flowing in and out for years.

• Ignored repeated anti-money-laundering red flags, including several third-party investors and repeated transfers unrelated to ordinary legal work.

• Allowed the attorney trust account to become a marketing tool, lending big bank credibility to the scheme.

“Wells Fargo nevertheless accepted hundreds of millions of dollars into the account … And Wells Fargo consistently processed thousands of dollars to pay off car loans and millions more to pay title companies for real estate. The bank also allowed Beasley to withdraw over a million dollars in cash, even though cash withdrawals are perhaps the most widely recognized indication that an attorney is misusing client funds.”

Since the 2008 financial crisis, Wells Fargo has agreed to nearly $16 billion in major settlements, penalties, restitution and consumer relief.

The Wells Fargo Wagon never stops making deliveries.

Read more

For nearly two decades, Russell Wasendorf Sr. stole more than $215 million from customer accounts while convincing regulators everything was perfectly fine.

His master weapon? A photocopier. Then, as technology progressed, he advanced to Photoshop.

Wasendorf quietly siphoned money out of customer-segregated accounts beginning in the early 1990s after his business partner pulled out with all his money, according to federal prosecutors. Each time he took money, he simply created fake bank statements showing balances that didn’t exist.

Instead of hacking computers or manipulating high-frequency trading algorithms, he allegedly intercepted bank confirmations, forged signatures, fabricated statements and even established a post office box that appeared to belong to U.S. Bank. Regulators mailed verification forms there. Wasendorf filled them out himself, signed someone else’s name, and mailed them back.

And nobody thought to pick up a telephone?

Wasendorf used most of the money to create the appearance of success when he was in fact failing. He also opened two restaurants in Cedar Falls and lived in luxury with a private jet and an estate that included a million-dollar indoor swimming pool and a 1,000-bottle wine cellar.

The deception continued year after year while Peregrine grew into one of America’s largest independent commodities and futures brokers – at least on paper.

Then came July 2012.

Facing an unexpected regulatory audit that required direct electronic confirmation from the bank rather than paper statements, Wasendorf realized the game was over.

He attempted suicide outside company headquarters, leaving behind a confession that detailed decades of fraud.

Investigators discovered that Peregrine claimed to be holding more than $220 million in customer funds. The real balance? About $5 million.

More than 13,000 customers ultimately lost money, and prosecutors said the fraud exceeded $215 million.

In 2013, a federal judge sentenced Wasendorf to 50 years in prison, the maximum allowed by law. He also ordered more than $215 million in restitution.

Acting U.S. Attorney Sean R. Berry of the Northern District of Iowa called him “a con man who built a business on smoke and mirrors.”

“By lying to investors and regulators, Wasendorf defrauded thousands of innocent investors out of a staggering $215,000,000,” Berry said.

And that’s the bigger embarrassment, a regulatory system that enabled such an unsophisticated fraud.

For nearly twenty years, regulators, auditors and financial institutions accepted paper documents created on a copy machine.

They might as well have sent the arrest warrant by fax.

“The glorification of profit … is harming both care and health. Health care should not be an engine for excessive private gain.” – Donald M. Berwick

If there’s an award for the most despicable medical billing fraud, I nominate Dr. Sanjeev Kumar, 45, a Mayo-trained gynecologic oncologist who ran the Poplar Avenue Clinic in Memphis.

Typically, medical billing fraud involves schemes like billing for services that were never rendered or upcoding for more expensive treatments than patients received.

Not Kumar. He found a way to reuse single-use medical devices in thousands of hysteroscopies and then billed private and government insurers as if he’d used new ones.

This is a stressful, highly personal, in-office procedure for detecting cancer. A scope and a grasper is inserted into the vagina, pushed through the cervix, and into the uterus for a biopsy, and then snip, snip.

Kumar did more than 15,000 of these procedures between September of 2019 and April of 2024. But he only purchased about 200 hysteroscopes.

“Thousands of women were subjected to hysteroscopies with biopsy using the dirty devices,” prosecutors said.

He billed more than $41 million for this service and netted more than $4.8 million from Medicare and Medicaid alone.

On Wednesday, Kumar was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Restitution will be determined in a hearing scheduled for Oct. 2. The FBI is looking for victims. The personal-injury lawyers are circling.

I might ask D. Michael Dunavant, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, to second my nomination:

“This defendant used his medical license to target a vulnerable population of women seeking treatment in extremely personal and intimate procedures. He was motivated by greed, disregarded clear medical risks, and caused significant physical and psychological harm to his victim-patients.”

CVS is too big to jail

As big as Kumar was with his $41 million fraud, he wasn’t nearly as big as the nation’s largest pharmacy chain.

CVS spent the week writing checks instead of hiring criminal defense lawyers.

The company agreed to resolve two healthcare fraud cases involving nearly half a billion dollars, including allegations that it improperly billed government healthcare programs for insulin prescriptions and that its Omnicare subsidiary submitted more than 3.3 million false prescription claims to Medicare, Medicaid and TRICARE.

The smaller settlement, $36.5 million, resolved allegations that CVS pharmacies billed Medicare and Medicaid for insulin refills that came too early, dispensed more insulin than patients needed and manipulated prescription days’ supply, causing government programs to pay claims they otherwise would have rejected.

The larger case involved Omnicare, which filed bankruptcy after a federal jury found the company submitted millions of false claims. After a judgment that approached $950 million, CVS agreed to settle for $440 million.

Unlike Kumar, CVS did not plead guilty to a crime.

No executives were charged. Nobody is headed to prison. Instead, the company put up money to put the cases behind it, a familiar outcome in corporate healthcare fraud, where enormous civil settlements are often the price of doing business.

A prescription for prison

Not too-big-to-jail this week was the founder of a California telehealth startup that turned ADHD treatment into what prosecutors called an online Adderall pill mill.

Done Global founder Ruthia He was sentenced to six years in federal prison and fined $1 million for orchestrating a $90 million scheme that prosecutors said used quick ADHD diagnoses to illegally distribute Adderall over the internet.

Her co-defendant, the company’s former clinical president, Dr. David Brody, received two years in prison and a $1 million fine as well.

If you think Adderall is overprescribed, here’s a case that supports your thesis.

According to the Justice Department, Done Global spent more than $40 million on social media advertising, luring patients with promises of quick diagnoses and easy access to stimulants.

Done Global’s scheme produced more than 37 million Adderall pills while defrauding the insurers and government healthcare programs who can’t seem to adequately cover all of their members’ medical needs.

But unlike CVS, it’s Done.

One thing I’ve noticed when it comes to white collar crime: If you make dupes of venture capital or private equity investors, there’s no two-tiered justice system for you. Christopher Kirchner is a case in point.

Read More: Chris Kirchner – Slync (Business Blunders Hall Of Shame)

Don’t Miss These Blunders

• Chartered Financial Asshats An embarrassing embezzlement case defied ethics, professionalism and even financial controls at the CFA Institute

• The Great Gatsby Of Crypto Christopher Delgado went from In-N-Out Burger to the Fontainebleau, buying credibility from politicians, celebrities and charities before his $400 million Ponzi scheme collapsed

• The Baloney Incident How JPMorgan Chase turned a deli tray into a multimillion-dollar battle and another reputational pickle

• Fuel For Fools Volkswagen can’t recover from ‘Dieselgate.’ FirstBank of Puerto Rico accused of banking Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. An embezzling healthcare CEO bets his clinic.

• Billion-Dollar Band-Aids The latest government crackdown on medical billing fraud showcases Ferraris, diamonds, luxury resorts and a yacht named ‘Butt Nekkid.’ But the real question is, how does this folly keep happening?

• Pre-Pardon Panic U.S. Senators introduce a resolution to discourage Trump from freeing FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried

• A Trickle And A Trillion Microfinance promised to alleviate global poverty. Megafinance created a trillionaire.

• 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

• Timeless Wisdom Often Ignored An anthology of the best quotes on business, leadership, investing, economics, fraud, failure, corporate folly and more

• 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

Here’s one of the first lines you read when you visit the CFA Institute’s website:

“Join more than 200,000 chartered financial analysts, globally recognized for their commitment to ethics and professionalism, when you complete the three CFA Program exams.”

Ethics and professionalism? Last month, the CFA Institute’s former chief marketing officer Michael Collins, 61, was sentenced to three-to-nine years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing nearly $6 million.

His feat was simple, yet it was mind boggling that it wasn’t caught sooner. He ripped off the CFA Institute by submitting 144 fake invoices between 2016 and 2024.

One hundred and forty-four fake invoices? And this is the organization that teaches analysts how to dissect financial statements?

Where, oh where, were the financial controls?

“In the years preceding and since the incident, we have significantly strengthened our internal controls to protect our organization against potential future misconduct,” the group said in a statement to Wealth Management.

How reassuring. Makes me want to sign up for the CFA exams so I, too, can learn the secrets of proper financial oversight.

In a statement that prosecutors read to the court, the group said:

“Our dues-paying members’ use of the CFA designation is a point of pride for them and signals their professional status to employers, peers, and clients. Therefore, the impact of Mr. Collins’ actions goes far beyond the damage to our organization; it has repercussions for the individual reputations of our 200,000-plus members. These members are justifiably upset by Mr. Collins’ theft, and we have much work to do to repair that damage and regain their trust.”

Business ethics isn't something you master on an exam. It's something you practice every day and enforce when someone doesn't.

At the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, the cadet honor code is emblazoned across a building front: “We will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does.”

Ethics are just this simple. But people who count money make them complicated.

Take the case of Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino. Last year, she became the first Harvard professor stripped of tenure in 80 years following allegations of “fraudulent data” in her research.

She was globally renowned for her research into dishonesty, and got fired for alleged dishonesty.

Read More: If You Like Data Colada … (Business Blunders)

Then there’s Ethisphere, the for-profit company behind the annual “World’s Most Ethical Companies” list. Companies pay to apply for a ranking, and winners can pay again to license the award logo for their advertising and investor materials.

Unsurprisingly, some companies that made its lists have also made headlines for shady practices and public scandals. But if you don’t have business ethics you can license them from Ethisphere.

Welcome to the business-ethics-industrial complex.

Don't Miss These Blunders

The business world doesn’t need more ethicists or chartered financial analysts. It needs guardrails. It needs checks and balances. It needs people in charge who will not look the other way. People who refuse to lie, cheat and steal or tolerate anyone who does.

But there’s no certification program for that.

Read more

The Orlando Economic Partnership received a detailed warning in September 2025 that one of its top investors was likely running a crypto-based Ponzi scheme.

All 38 team members who received the warning ultimately did nothing.

Goliath Ventures and its founder Christopher Alexander Delgado remained on the organization’s website under a page headlined: “Join Our Top Investors – CHAMPIONS FOR BROAD-BASED PROSPERITY®”

The listing put Goliath beside Disney, the Orlando Magic and other donors that had put up at least $200,000.

Danny de Hek, a New Zealand-based investigative reporter, warned the partnership that this promotion lent giant credibility to a soon-to-be toppled Goliath. But the partnership didn’t remove this crime-in-progress from its website until after Delgado’s arrest in February

Last week, Delgado pleaded guilty to conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering charges after what prosecutors now call a $400 million Ponzi scheme that operated from January 2023 to January 2026.

This was a cryptocurrency startup that emerged out of nowhere. It was run by a man with few credentials. He’d spent eight of his 34 years working for In-N-Out Burger in California.

It’s still a mystery exactly how he raised so much money and spent almost all of it in just three years.

No one pulls off a stunt this large alone. Prosecutors refer to co-conspirators who have not been charged. And investors have filed lawsuits against the nation’s largest bank – JPMorgan Chase – and one of the nation’s largest law firms – Alston & Bird – and even crypto exchange Coinbase for their relationships with Goliath.

For now, suffice it to say that everyone loves a Ponzi scheme when they’re still throwing off cash, flashing opulence and staging lavish parties.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his classic tale of fraud in the 1920s:

“They accepted Gatsby as a matter of course and without question; he was just a man named Gatsby who had a big house and gave parties, and that was enough.”

Delgado raised money from more than 1,600 investors and used it to buy credibility, like the kind he received from the Orlando Economic Partnership, while he pursued a ridiculous collection of luxury trophies.

He bought eight Orlando-area properties, valued between $1.15 million and $8.5 million and 11 luxury vehicles, including a 2025 Lamborghini Revuelto valued at nearly $720,000 and a 2023 Rolls Royce Cullinan valued at more than $472,000. He also bought jewelry, designer handbags, and enough wine and spirits to stock a high-end hotel.

Rolex, Louis Vuitton and Tiffany ought to advertise: “All the junk you’ll eventually surrender to the U.S. Marshalls.”

Delgado also made a self-funded run for a post on Florida’s Orange County Commission, but lost. He splashed some of his loot on Republican Party causes. He flashed photographs of himself with President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis and House Speaker Mike Johnson.

He pledged well-publicized donations to local charities and civic causes. He ran up legal bills, even filing a defamation lawsuit against de Hek that was dropped after an arrest proved de Hek was onto something.

He spent millions on luxury travel accommodations, extravagant business gatherings and like Gatsby, outrageously expensive parties. Goliath not only leased prominent office space in downtown Orlando's Chase Tower, but established a presence in Dubai, one of the world's emerging cryptocurrency hubs.

In December 2025, for instance, even as he turned down investor requests for redemptions, prosecutors say he spent $9 million hosting a James Bond, “Casino Royale”-themed Christmas party at the Fountainebleau in Miami Beach.

When I see shameless spending, my first question is, ‘Whose money is it?’ Too many others think, ‘Wow, this guy is a raging success. I want to be like him.”

A classic Ponzi schemer is not a “Champion of Prosperity.” Like so many others, the Orlando Economic Partnership claims it was duped.

Delgado faces up to 50 years in prison when he is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 8.

Until then, he’s under house arrest, confined to an 11,000 square-foot mansion with a six-car garage, a pool, and a view of an Arnold Palmer-designed golf course.

Read more

Wall Street regularly produces insider trading rings, stock manipulation scandals, money laundering, fake accounts, crypto collapses, Ponzi schemes and enough billion-dollar settlements to stock every Super Bowl party in America.

Yet somehow, the latest battle rocking the financial world is over salami.

In 2024, JPMorgan Chase fired Los Angeles-based wealth advisor Brent Ryan Bodner, after he charged $642.50 on his corporate credit card for a deli tray.

Now $642.50 may sound like an existential threat to a bank with nearly $5 trillion in assets, especially when the offending employee managed only about $1 billion for wealthy clients. But to be fair, the order may have also included a full assortment of meats, cheeses and pickles, as well as chicken wings and cookies.

Nonetheless, Bodner’s lawyer described the case as “the salami incident” in an email to The Wall Street Journal – helping craft a headline that could top a news story like a squirt of Grey Poupon on almost any deli sandwich.

Bodner claimed he was wrongfully terminated and last month he won a $4.25 million judgment before an arbitration panel at FINRA, or the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which typically settles such matters for the industry.

Bodner had asked for $30 million. Apparently even the arbitrators thought his meat was overpriced. But on Monday, JPMorgan Chase went crying to federal court with a motion to vacate the award.

The big bank called the judgment“lawless” and said it misrepresented the reason it fired Bodner.

Bodner, who joined JPMorgan Chase in 2012, ordered the deli tray for a Super Bowl party at his home, where he’d hoped to entertain prospective clients. Most didn’t show. San Francisco lost to Kansas City. But the charge for the deli tray went through.

JPMorgan said the expense report – filed by Bodner’s assistant who is also his sister – did not indicate that it was consumed at Bodner’s home, a violation of its expense policy.

Bodner claimed there was a misunderstanding and that the ensuing flap was really just a pretext to poach his clients. The bank countered that he was an at-will employee it could fire for any reason.

“By misrepresenting the nature of an expense to access corporate funds, Bodner had abused a position of trust, and he had violated clear corporate policies,” the bank argued in its petition.

This is a bank that in 2023 agreed to pay $290 million to Jeffrey Epstein victims who claimed it made Epstein’s global sex-trafficking network possible.

And it calls this an abuse of trust?

Don't Miss These Blunders

Here’s how expense accounting works at most companies:

When an employee gets too aggressive, the Big Cheese kicks back the report:

“Hey bonehead, you can’t expense this kind of baloney.”

“Oh, sorry, I was just kinda winging it.”

Or, if the inappropriate expense slips through the approval process like this one deli tray did, the employer can ask the employee to pay it back in the next expense cycle:

“I hope we don’t have to make too big a dill out of it.”

A bank the size of JPMorgan Chase knows that mistakes and misunderstandings happen. You don’t turn them into Deli-Gate.

Bodner is now at Wells Fargo, and it’s a safe bet a sizable percentage of his clients have gone with him. He could entice more by borrowing a line from Arby’s: “We have the meats.”

Read more

“Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. … What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum.” – Alan Greenspan, (March 6, 1926 – June 22, 2026)

Volkswagen is reportedly preparing to cut 100,000 jobs and end production at four German plants in its most extensive retrenchment in its 89-year history because …

Well, when you get right down to it … the global automaker can’t seem to wash its hands clean of all the diesel soot its cars belched out beginning in the 2000s.

So much for German engineering. These automotive geniuses somehow decided that the planet’s oiliest fuel was a clean-air solution.

In 2009, while companies like Tesla were developing electric cars, VW rolled out the Jetta TDI, promising diesel engines that would satisfy tough U.S. emissions standards while delivering excellent fuel economy.

They sold the whole world on “Clean Diesel,” which now seems about as believable as organic Twinkies.

The trick was software that allowed the vehicles to fake emissions tests, and it sold as well as a finely honed Florida time-share pitch.

In 2009, the Green Car Journal gave the Jetta its “Green Car of the Year” award. Clean diesel engines also went into other models: Jetta SportWagen, Golf, Beetle, Passat, and Touareg SUV, as well as the Audi A3, A6, A7, A8/A8L, and the Q and Q7 SUV.

The automaker put 590,000 of these smog-blowers on U.S. roads. But in 2015, its dubious green success exploded into “Dieselgate.”

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The automaker eventually pleaded guilty to three felonies and paid more than $33 billion in fines and compensation to vehicle owners.

Several engineers and executives went to prison, a handful of cases are still pending, and the CEO who led the charge on this scandal, Martin Winterkorn, remains a fugitive from justice in the U.S. because his native Germany doesn’t extradite its citizens.

Also in Germany, Winterkorn is considered too frail to stand trial at age 79 for the greatest fraud in automotive history.

So here we are. VW has spent the past decade paying for yesterday while trying to build tomorrow.

Its stock remains down more than 70% from its 2014 high. And years of recovery attempts have left it unable to deal with fierce competition from Chinese automakers, rising labor and commodity costs, and a sluggish transition to electric vehicles.

Volkswagen wasted years trying to convince drivers they could save the planet one diesel engine at a time. It fooled emissions tests, regulators and millions of customers, but it couldn’t fool the future.

Insufficient checks

Jeffrey Epstein got his start banking at FirstBank Puerto Rico, which knowingly profited from his sex trafficking operations, according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday.

According to a 91-page complaint, FirstBank maintained 30 accounts for the world’s most notorious creep from at least 1998 through 2020 after he died. That would mark his longest-running banking relationship uncovered so far.

Banks are supposed to abide by “know your customer” laws, and FirstBank had a duty to know that Epstein had been a registered sex offender since 2008.

Similar cases against some of the world’s largest banks have already resulted in huge settlements:

• JPMorgan Chase paid $290 million in 2023 to settle claims by Epstein survivors.

• Deutsche Bank paid $75 million in 2023.

• Bank of America reached a $72.5 million settlement earlier this year in another survivor class action, while denying wrongdoing.

FirstBank, which has branches in Epstein’s old stalking grounds in South Florida, allowed him to finance the operation and pay recruiters and victims, the lawsuit alleges.

One of FirstBank’s slogans is, “Together Nothing Stops Us.” Apparently, no one did.

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A healthcare CEO who bet the clinic

The former CEO of Community Clinic Network in Wenatchee, Wash., pleaded guilty to a single wire fraud charge on Thursday after prosecutors alleged he ran a $24 million embezzlement scheme to fund his losing stock trades.

Patrick Alan Bucknum, 55, secretly made more than $30 million in transfers from CCN’s accounts into his personal brokerage account, hoping to profit from stock, options and ETF trading, according to a plea agreement.

CCN is not a company that runs casinos. It manages payments for Medicaid-funded health clinics at a time when healthcare is bankrupting the nation and millions of its citzens. But then grifting the sick and dying, as well as the U.S. taxpayer, has become a national pastime.

Bucknum’s spree began in 2017 and ran through 2023. Too bad he learned his aggressive trading strategies from social media.

He quickly fell into the trap of throwing good money after bad – other people’s good money, that is. He repeatedly stole more in desperate attempts to recoup his losses. He ended up losing most of the loot, but did return about $7 million, leaving CCN with a net loss of $24,368,427.37.

At the top of his losing game, Bucknum bought himself a $100,000 truck, a $77,000 Tesla and a $33,000 boat. He also put $1.2 million in gold, silver and platinum coins, none of which could buy him a bag of Cheetos from a prison commissary.

He’s slated to be sentenced on Sept. 23.

His name means ruler in Greek and he spent his shareholders’ money like a king.

Read More: John Rigas – Adelphia Communications (Business Blunders Hall Of Shame.

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• Billion-Dollar Band-Aids The latest government crackdown on medical billing fraud showcases Ferraris, diamonds, luxury resorts and a yacht named ‘Butt Nekkid.’ But the real question is, how does this folly keep happening?

• Pre-Pardon Panic U.S. Senators introduce a resolution to discourage Trump from freeing FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried

• A Trickle And A Trillion Microfinance promised to alleviate global poverty. Megafinance created a trillionaire.

• 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

• Timeless Wisdom Often Ignored An anthology of the best quotes on business, leadership, investing, economics, fraud, failure, corporate folly and more

• 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.

Some medical professionals can squeeze an extraordinary amount of green from a taxpayer-funded wound – and it oozes faster than puss.

How about $1 million per patient?

Marizel Yukee, a 49-year-old nurse practitioner in Las Vegas, allegedly billed that tidy sum to Medicare per patient and our government actually paid it for years.

This is how she got her $865,000 Bulgari necklace, her $600,000 Ferrari, and an entire beach resort in the Philippines, among other trophies of the luxe life – all of it now seized by federal authorities.

Yukee and her co-conspirators allegedly submitted $906 million in claims to Medicare and other government healthcare programs. Prosecutors say she billed for medically unnecessary wound-care treatments on elderly Medicare beneficiaries, many of whom were already in hospice care.

Nearly a billion dollars billed. Nearly $300 million paid. Much of it for soon-to-be-dead bodies.

How does this happen? Call it economies of scale. Yukee was running wound care companies in California, Hawaii, Nevada and Texas, where she was finally indicted.

It’s yet another outrageous tale from our price-gouging healthcare system.

But Yukee is just one of 465 medical professionals arrested in what the Justice Department on Tuesday called one of the largest healthcare fraud takedowns in its history. We’re talking $6.5 billion in cold-hearted fraud and shameless profiteering off the sick and dying – and of course, every one of us as taxpayers.

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  ---

The biggest case in the batch involved a network that generated more than $4 billion in fraudulent claims providing amniotic wound products that were allegedly relabeled and marked up by 2,000% before being billed to Medicare.

Elsewhere, prosecutors described sprawling networks of telemedicine marketers, laboratory operators and medical suppliers who allegedly treated government healthcare programs as little more than automated cash machines. (Here’s a mind-numbing summary of all the cases.)

Then there’s a mental-health entrepreneur Daniel Robinson, 59, of Palos Park, Ill., accused of billing for behavioral health counseling and therapy services that were never provided. We’re talking over $92 million of which $75 million was paid.

Robinson loaded on luxury items, too, including an $85,000 Bentley and a yacht on Lake Michigan named “Butt Nekkid.” Now his bare ass is swinging in the wind.

It goes without saying that all of the defendants are considered innocent until proven guilty.

But I’ve been writing these tales for a long time and when I see baubles like an $865,000 necklace, or garage full of six-figure cars, stupid boats, or other ostentatious displays of wealth, I’m conditioned to suspect someone may be stealing.

Especially if they are in an industry that is supposed to be caring for people.

The problem isn’t that some medical professionals lie, cheat and steal. The problem is that we have an unchecked system that allows them get away with it – at least until some band of crusaders finally decides to sue or prosecute.

These poor Medicare miscreants could face jail time if convicted. Big companies like UnitedHealth or HCA Healthcare mostly just get sued when they’re suspected of billing fraud.

And as last year’s round-up of 324 medical billing fraudsters proves, prosecution isn’t prevention. It’s just another billion-dollar Band-Aid.

Don't Miss These Blunders

Read more

“Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” - Adam Smith

President Donald Trump has granted clemency to so many white-collar criminals that a bipartisan pair of U.S. senators fear he’ll free the most notorious crypto-klepto of all: Sam Bankman-Fried.

On Wednesday, Sens. Ruben Gallego, D-AZ, and Cynthia Lummis, R-WY, took the rare step of introducing a resolution expressing that the FTX founder should not receive any form of clemency.

Bankman-Fried, 34, is serving a 25-year prison sentence after building one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges and basically looting it into bankruptcy. Last week, he lost his latest appeal and now seems down to his last hope.

The furry-headed fraudster has been sucking up to Trump for more than a year, framing his case in familiar Trump themes of victimhood.

“Sam Bankman-Fried is a criminal,” Gallego said. “He took advantage of millions of Americans and stole their savings. Perhaps worst of all, he has shown no remorse for his crimes and has instead tried to laughably claim he is a victim of ‘lawfare.’ What a joke. Keep him locked up.”

In normal times, this would all go without saying. But Trump has granted scores of pardons and commutations to people found guilty of everything from tax evasion to Ponzi schemes, and Bankman-Fried has a pending application for clemency.

Most notably, relative to the crypto world, Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, 49, who pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-money-laundering requirements and was sentenced to four months in prison.

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

Let me repeat that: Binance basically admitted to allowing crypto transactions with Iran, our sworn enemy. But Trump called Zhao the victim of a Biden “witch hunt.”

Not surprisingly, Binance then backed a nascent crypto venture tied to Trump’s family, World Liberty Financial, helping push its valuation from millions into the billions, according to the Wall Street Journal.

So nice that Binance could help.

Bankman-Fried, on the other hand, has been ordered to forfeit $11 billion in assets and his FTX empire is history. This raises the question: If Bankman-Fried gets a pardon, what’s in it for Trump?

The screwworm economy

The screwworm isn’t just a flesh-eating larva, it eats taxpayer dollars, too.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is preparing to spend more than $1 billion on eradicating the pest, which had been contained beyond U.S. borders for the past six decades.

Suddenly, we now have about a dozen cases in cattle herds in Texas and New Mexico, which industry leaders fear could spread.

Could it be because the Trump administration cut more than 2,100 employees from the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or about 25% of its workforce?

Nah, Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins this week placed the blame squarely on the Biden administration’s loose immigration policies.

You know, illegal immigrants and their infected cattle creeping through the uncompleted wall that Mexico was supposed to pay for.

This, of course, makes no sense when you consider the lifecycle of the screwworm is less than 54 days and Trump has been in office for 500 days, notes Democratic U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu of California.

Beef prices are already near record highs and a massive spread of this pest could turn an ordinary cheeseburger into a major household budget item.

Rollings can crow all she wants, but Democrats are determined to stick Republicans with the blame. Here’s what the party’s Kendall Witmer had to say:

“From Trump’s unhinged trade war that locked farmers out of their markets to his war with Iran that has made fuel and fertilizer unaffordable, Americans are fed up, and Trump doesn’t give a damn.”

To be sure, beyond assigning political blame, we don’t have conclusive evidence for how the screwworm got into the U.S.

But perhaps there is no better metaphor than the screwworm to define our times.

Slash employees to cut costs, only to incur exponentially higher expenses when no one is doing their jobs. Republicans blaming Democrats. Democrats blaming Republicans. And all of us getting screwed by a worm.

Whose ‘unconditional surrender’ is this?

Did Trump just lose the Iran war that he unilaterally started?

Let’s leave that answer up to the editorial board at that liberal, fake-news rag known as The Wall Street Journal. Here’s what they opined on Thursday:

“The memorandum of understanding was reached from a position of U.S. weakness, not strength.

“The U.S. had options but Mr. Trump blinked at the risk. Instead, after two months of cease-fire weakness while the public soured and oil reserves declined, the President acknowledges he gave in to Iran’s economic pressure.”

Trump so much admitted as much on Wednesday when he said, “the alternative would be a world-wide depression.”

Negotiations are slated to continue on Sunday, but they are going no where. Just as oil prices were heading lower, Iran claims the Strait of Hormuz is closed for business.

Maybe things will improve, Trump fans, but so far this is going down as the biggest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.

Your thoughts?

Leave a comment

Ride scaring

Waymo on Thursday announced it was recalling nearly 3,900 robotaxis this week after reports they were driving into closed construction zones.

Then this morning, I spotted this billboard while trolling around Los Angeles:

It’s old data, and these are isolated cases relative the number of rides the ride-sharing company provides each day, but Uber is still dealing with the lawsuits.

And I have a question:

What’s scarier? Uber with a driver? Or Waymo without one?

Leave a comment

Like the sign says, ‘Pay as you like’

Don’t Miss These Blunders

• A Trickle And A Trillion Microfinance promised to alleviate global poverty. Megafinance created a trillionaire.

• 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

• Timeless Wisdom Often Ignored An anthology of the best quotes on business, leadership, investing, economics, fraud, failure, corporate folly and more

• 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.

“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

Ronald Ross:

“Wall Street’s favorite scam is pretending that luck is skill.”

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

The Dali Lama:

“Optimism doesn’t mean that you are blind to the reality of the situation.”

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.

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 cryptocrrencies. Or maybe capitalism is more of a religion and less of a science than we think.

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