"There was a guy preceding him named Miller. A Miller scheme doesn’t trip off the tongue quite as happily.”

During my morning walk, I was doing some serious cerebration trying to estimate to the nearest million the number of times I've heard the phrase "Ponzi Scheme" in the last few months, and how many more times I was likely to hear in it 2009. I had to give up since it involved such large numbers.

I was also reminded of a couple of important historical figures, those being Abraham and Achilles.

I'm sure you remember the point in the Torah when God tells Abraham that he's going to have lots of descendants, and Abraham replies that he's glad to hear it. I imagined God telling Charles Ponzi that he too would have lots of descendants, and that he also replied that he was glad to hear it.

I then imagined Charles Ponzi being offered a choice by the gods of either living a life of relative harmony and legal behavior, after which he will die and never be heard of again, or living life as a criminal during which he will be much bothered and go to prison, but his name will be on human lips for the ages, coupled with the wonderfully expressive word "scheme". Which would he choose?

Anyway, I just found this about Ponzi on the NY Times by Sewell Chan, who might well be a Torah scholar and a Classicist:

"The $50 billion fraud that federal authorities say Bernard L. Madoff perpetuated has already been called the largest Ponzi scheme in history (though Dealbook reports there seem to be other contenders for that distinction).

On the surface, at least, it would seem that Mr. Ponzi and Mr. Madoff could hardly be more different. Mr. Madoff, 70, was a fixture in the high-flying worlds of finance and philanthropy, with a reputation that extended from Manhattan’s moneyed elite to the exclusive golf clubs of Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Ponzi, who died in 1949, was a fast-talking immigrant and college dropout, whose scheme — according to Mitchell Zuckoff, Mr. Ponzi’s biographer — rested on the eagerness of ordinary working people to benefit from the wealth they saw being generated around them during the last Gilded Age.

“He had his nose pressed against the glass,” Mr. Zuckoff, a professor of journalism at Boston University and a former reporter for The Boston Globe, said in a phone interview on Monday. “He was not linked with Wall Street and New York, though he had dreams of being like Rockefeller.”