Perhaps people are particularly naive, but once again I am shaking my head and asking, “How could anyone be so stupid?” while reading the news of what seems to be yet another Ponzi scheme.
This one is small, reportedly involving only a few Minnesota victims. However, it comes on the heels of Tom Petters’ well-publicized multi-billion-dollar fraud, plus that of Trevor Cook and Pat Kiley in Minnesota; not to mention Bernie Madoff on a much larger scale, all just a few years ago. News of yet another scheme makes one wonder what has happened to common sense.
First, the basics: The Securities and Exchange Commission has gone to federal court to shut down a Minnesota broker selling promissory notes issued by a Miami-based investment firm, purportedly to buy accounts receivable from businesses in Brazil. The notes supposedly guaranteed returns of 12 to 13 percent a year. At least 12 of the 420 U.S. investors who have plunked some $64 million into the scheme are Minnesotans.
The notes are not registered with the SEC, and the local broker pushing them allegedly is not registered himself. Providence Financial Investments, the Miami firm, reportedly has put only two-thirds of funds from investors into the Brazilian receivables and currently holds such assets at a level equal to only a sixth of investor funds. It is having a hard time collecting on the ones it does have. And the underlying economic fundamentals, including the state of the Brazilian economy and the value of its currency relative to the U.S. dollar, are moving against the scheme, even if it were completely legit.
The story is confusing, however, because of all the technical terms used. What are “registered securities,” “accounts receivable” or “factoring”? Can one blame investors for being confused? The technical terms are real, though also perhaps used to obfuscate the risks. The money also is real — which leads one to ask whether confusion should lead to gullibility. It never should. When in doubt, stay out.
Start with the purported ultimate use of the investors’ money — short-term financing of Brazilian businesses. I have personal knowledge of this from a semester in Brazil in 1972. Supposedly I was conducting “independent study” for my degree, but most of my time was spent bopping around with friends. One was Jaime, an engineer-contractor 30 years my senior. He built small factories, retail-office buildings and a few private schools.
One of his clients was Professor Caruso, who ran a for-profit high school in a suburb of Rio with about 250 students. He wanted to expand, and contracted my friend to add six more classrooms and a roofed lunch area. The contract specified total payment of some $35,000 at three stages of work. So it was a project contract and also a promissory note.
That contract was an “account receivable.” If he did the work, Jaime had a legal right to those payments on the dates specified. However, he ran things on a shoestring and needed money for workers and material. So he went to a bank. But banks require collateral. Other than a beat-up Jeep and some concrete mixers, the only asset Jaime had was the contract to construct Professor Caruso’s new rooms. So this contract was pledged as security for the loan.
A contract to build and pay is not money in the bank, however. Many things could happen, the job would take time and inflation was running about 30 percent. So the contracts were “discounted,” and Jaime got only some $30,000 in cash. As the progress payments dates fell due, the bank itself would collect from Caruso. The difference of $5,000 was the bank’s fees and interest.
History buffs will note that these “duplicatas,” or duplicate contracts, were essentially the same as the “bill of exchange” among European merchants starting in the late Middle Ages. “Discounting,” or the loaning of money as some fraction of the face value of a business contract presented as collateral, was a business practiced over centuries that led directly to the Federal Reserve’s “discount window” and to the short-term “discount rate” that served as the Fed’s target interest rate indicator for decades.
Jaime dealt with Bradesco, the “Brazilian Bank of Discounts,” then a growing bank and now a huge multinational. Bradesco probably held onto Professor Caruso’s IOU. But other banks might pass these on to others in a secondary “rediscount” market. Bradesco was a full-service bank, but there also were lenders whose only business was “discounting” accounts receivable. Such firms exist here too and are called “factors.” In U.S. practice, resorting to “factoring” is often seen as the last step above a mob loan shark for businesses with bad credit. But in many countries, borrowing on the basis of another person’s IOUs is a common practice, even for healthy businesses.
That brings us back home. The allegedly unregistered local broker the SEC is attempting to shut down was taking money from Minnesotans to be put into large blocks, exchanged into Brazilian cruzeiros and used to buy up business promissory notes, or IOUs, in that country’s “discount” and “rediscount” markets. The larger the discount, the greater the return on a given IOU when it is collected. Interest rates in Brazil are high. Providence Financial in Miami and the accused broker here promised investors 12 percent or more — in dollars.
However, risk in lending to small businesses in another country and another currency are also enormous. A private school with new rooms or a store with a new stock of clothing must actually enroll students or sell dresses to have the cash to pay the bill when it comes due. Any financial intermediaries, banks, factors or whatever, in the whole chain have to be solvent and pass the funds along.
Moreover, the IOUs that must be paid are all in Brazilian currency. At some point, as money works its way back to the U.S. lender, it must be exchanged into U.S. dollars. Even when every IOU is paid, if the value of the cruzeiro falls more than expected in comparison to the dollar, there won’t be as many dollars to repay Minnesota investors as thought or promised.
“What could possibly go wrong?” The broker under investigation allegedly sold these investments, “promissory notes,” at “Social Security seminars.” He was not a registered broker. The notes were not registered securities. Providence and the broker “guaranteed” an interest rate several times greater than what could be earned on other investments. All of this not only screams scam — it flashes fraud in blinking neon lights.
Add in Brazil’s widely reported political and economic problems that would jinx an investment model like this, even if carried out with strict honesty, and it becomes clear that the poor folks who bit are not likely to get more than a few cents on the dollar back.
Looking at the positive side, only 420 people allegedly were duped. The scheme allegedly breaks the law. The SEC is taking action. Some people could get at least nominal jail time. News of the affair may prompt other potential investors to be more wary.
On the pessimistic side, look at some of the “crowd funding” initiatives that are sprouting on the Internet. Fascination with this new medium lulls people into ignoring risk in many ways, not just appeals for working capital. Regulation always lags technological innovation. Expect more scams, and new variations on an age-old theme, to emerge as time goes on.