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"Albania's 1996 Ponzi scheme frenzy: So, what's America's excuse?"

11 Comments -

1 – 11 of 11
Anonymous Ross said...

I read somewhere that many Albanians who invested in the pyramid schemes knew full well it was a con, but they thought it was a front for some kind of criminal enterprise.

Don't know whether that is actually true.

3/5/09, 3:29 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

they found their jeep upside down. The yokels explained that they had flipped the vehicle over because they just wanted to see whether it was male or female.

Somehow I suspect that is a yokel mocking joke that has been around since the invention of the car.

3/5/09, 6:37 PM

Anonymous Ivy League Bastard said...

Steve,

if you're looking into the 90's pyramid schemes abroad, the one in Czechoslovakia cannot be beat. The ensuing extradition war with the "Pirate of Prague" was dragging on until rather recently, with the Pirate winning so far. The story has characters and byzantine subplots straight out of a spy novel.

3/5/09, 11:16 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

just a minor quibble. the NATO strategic bombing (i.e. back to the stone age) was largely ineffective. It in fact had the usual effect of strengthening the bombees result *see 'the Bilitz) for another example. What forced the Serbs out of the section of their own country called Kosovo (and Metoxija) was NATO's acting as basically the close air support air wing of the KLA/UCK> Tge Serbs were dug in, but couldn' operate against their enemy on the ground in Kosovo.

3/6/09, 2:04 AM

Anonymous rightsaidfred said...

please explain to me why those last paragraphs don't apply to a number of major American financial institutions.

They DO apply. And with the Chicago boys in charge, expect it to apply to the Federal gov't very soon.

We have the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization act. It is time to start applying it to our ruling elites.

3/6/09, 2:36 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Steve, why do you think the Kosovo Albanians were engaging in "mostly peaceful" protest? They'd been going on like Palestinians in the Second Intifada since 1988. It should have been no surprise to anyone how things went once the KLA (on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations until a little bit AFTER we started giving them close air support) actually got significant armaments.

Planetary Archon Mouse

3/6/09, 2:45 AM

Blogger H. said...

It's funny to think that America and Albania have so much in common.
Perhaps, the way things may go under the Obama administration, the USA will have more in common with Albania--or Yugoslavia in the 90s--than just pyramid schemes.

3/6/09, 5:43 AM

Blogger Ronduck said...

During the 1996 elections, several of the companies made campaign contributions to the ruling Democratic Party.

Mental note: never vote for an organization named the "Democratic Party".

3/6/09, 7:42 AM

Anonymous heliopolis said...

'...everybody in newly capitalist Albania fell hard for that recurrent disease of capitalism known as pyramid (or Ponzi) schemes.'

Well, I happen to know a few American Albanians living in the US for quite a long time. Why wouldn't they enlighten their poor cousins about the advantages of free market society?

Interested about the replacement of indigenous population with significant 'other?
Well then, you should brush up on the official USA policy in regards to ethnic, tribal, and religious fractions in Balkans (and elsewhere).

http://rpc.senate.gov/releases/1997/iran.htm

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B03EFDB1E39F932A05756C0A960958260&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/C/Clinton,%20Bill

http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA374.htm

3/6/09, 3:51 PM

Blogger neil craig said...

Not sure how much the Albanian collapse was responsible for the arming of the KLA. There is a KLA video showing them in German uniform parkas. & they were regularly armed with the Austrian Steyr rifle. Also there were many speedboats going to Albania mone of which the NATO fleet, there to maintain UN sanctions was, able to intercept because they were speedboats. The fleet were also unable to identify the country on the other side of the adriatic they came from. Also there is a particularly incredible story of Caritas supplying the KLA with thousands of mortars & anti-aircraft missiles stolen from a NATO base.

http://www.mail-archive.com/news@antic.org/msg06651.html

Surprisingly the MSM didn't notice this ;-)

3/8/09, 9:30 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

No, that's the exact opposite of what happened. The Serbian army was not defeated on the ground in Kosovo. The bombing of civilian infrastructure caused the population of Serbia to turn against the government.

3/9/09, 4:55 PM

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