Samenvatting

Charles Kindleberger unravelled the anatomy of a typical financial crisis in his famous book Manias, panics and crashes (1978). He stresses that during a boom the tendency to swindle and be swindled runs parallel to the tendency to speculate. In this article five famous and non-famous swindles over the past ninety years are analyzed. Each financial boom, and each financial crisis during this period of modern capitalism experienced at least one famous financial swindle, which is to be seen as typical for the boom and the subsequent deception. The five swindlers described are Charles (Carlo) Ponzi in the 1920s, Ivar Krueger around 1930, Bernie Cornfeld in the 1960s/1970s, Michael Milken in the 1980s and - very recently - Bernard Madoff. His 65 billion dollar fraud is to be seen as the first worldwide Ponzi scheme - a fraud that lasted longer, reached wider and cut deeper than any similar scheme in history. An analysis of these five cases yields several striking similarities. It is concluded that financial swindles are no random events, but the result of both structural changes and circular waves of economic and financial boom and bust.