The Real Margin — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

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TEE-ECO-CD-PON-01-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

The Real Margin Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

Between December 1919 and August 1920 Ponzi promised fifty per cent in ninety days in Boston, on postal coupons whose real margin was a fraction of that. The print is the difference between what was promised and what the coupon gave.

A Author

Charles Ponzi

B Subject

Pyramid Schemes

C Aesthetic

Diagram · Typographic

Exploration

The business existed. International reply coupons were bought in Italy at Italian prices and exchanged in the United States for stamps at American prices, and the difference was real. Ponzi did not invent it: he read it on an envelope that reached him from Europe.

What did not work was the scale. To produce the returns he promised, hundreds of millions of coupons would have been needed, and there were not that many in the world; the margin was true and ridiculous at the same time. So he paid the first investors' interest with the money of those coming in behind, which is the only way a small sum can look large for a while.

It lasted eight months. At the peak, two hundred thousand dollars a day came into a Boston office.

They named the structure after him, which is an odd sort of posterity: the man remembered is the one who made it famous, not those who had done it before.

Details