The stock market is not the real World! It is the center of the symbolic World of money. The biblical horsemen of the apocalypse were symbols based on real physical phenomena; War, Pestilence, Famine and Death. The stock market is under threat from four symbolic horsemen that ride with every financial scam ever dreamed up by the speculation devil.
Take for example the Bernard Madoff stock market scam or Ponzi scheme. This was the mother of all stock market scams but basically a simple confidence trick. All stock market scams can be picked out because of the four horsemen. Leading the charge are Promises. ‘Get rich quick’, ‘above market gains guaranteed’, ‘fully hedged against loss no matter the market conditions’. The Madoff scam promised, no, guaranteed big 8 to 13% returns on investment, no matter if the stock market was ‘bull’ or ‘bear’. Now hindsight is a wonderful thing but there were thousands of really smart people who didn’t hear this horseman’s charging hooves.
Stock market high finance confidence tricks all surround themselves with Exclusivity and draw victims in by invitation only. The essence of Madoff was all exclusivity. New York Jewish financiers, like Madoff himself were at the center. Madoff was very picky about the money he would take to finance his Ponzi scheme. The less he actually courted the finance people the more desperate they became to throw money into his exclusive club. The scheme sucked in finance from around the World including hedge funds like the Fairfield Greenwich Group, who surely owed their depositors more due diligence on their $7 billion. All the time the select finance was busy introducing their finance network into the Madoff Ponzi scheme. Those few who cried out warnings about this approaching Exclusivity horseman were drowned out by applause for Madoff.
All of the large finance cons are shrouded in mystery and pray on people’s desire to believe in Secrets and super heroes. All of the Madoff believers felt that the man himself was gifted with special stock market knowledge or incredible finance strength or could fly on wings of economic insight. There is something in us all that needs to believe in the supernatural and it afflicts even the guard dogs of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Madoff Ponsi scam was like all other finance scams in that it had the fourth horseman of the stock market apocalypse and that was called Bubbles. The investment pot, or in these cases ‘black hole’ would be a better description, inflated to unimaginable proportions and burst. Leaving the bewildered investors in enormous distress and always considerably worse off than before they were run over by the horsemen.
What was truly amazing about the Madoff Ponzi finance balloon was how long it continued to grow. For more than 20 years the money flowed in, exponentially outstripping any necessary payouts that were made. In these economic bubbles there is never enough actual profit to make good on the Promises to everybody and so Bubbles had to pop and Secrets revealed as nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
