Said a dying Ponzi, “"Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over." 
	How can we prevent another Ponzi scheme? These types of schemes are hard to spot until they are over and innocent people have been swindled, but there are always financial irregularities. A financier’s rise may be too fast or the numbers may not add up. But one of the most indefatigable problems is the widespread corruption, and inability to say no. This was evidenced in the Enron case, as numerous executives from firms such as Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs let blatant dishonesty occur.  vWho bore the brunt of the damage? It was the honest workers, such as the oil lineman see in the movie “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” directed by Alex Gibney and based on the watershed reporting by Bethany McLean. 
	Whether the issue is Enron or Madoff, or any other bubble or fraud, the culture of American business must be changed if we all want to survive, Says Alex Brigham, executive director of the Ethisphere Institute, “many companies paid lip-service to corporate ethics and compliance, maintaining such departments but sidelining them in major decisions.” Brigham has started the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance, “inviting corporations to commit themselves to a set of ethical standards and pledge to follow ‘the letter and spirit’ of the law to curb illegal behavior.” PepsiCo, Wal-Mart Stores, Dell, General Electric and United Airlines have already signed up, but it will require a greater importance of ethics, and its enforcers, across the board to actually make the significant change that our company so desperately needs. Bubbles are only blown to be popped, and fraud only exists to be foiled. We are doing ourselves no good by carrying on this pattern of corruption within business, finance, and corporate culture. As the former president and general Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Only Americans can hurt America.”


	What if you were in high school, going through the daily grind of schoolwork and social life, getting ready to take the SAT’s and apply to college- and your high school shut down. This would be a black swan event in your life. Nassim Taleb is the author of “The Black Swan,” a book that covers such phenomena on both a micro (as detailed above) and macro level.  A black swan event must meet three main criteria: the event is a surprise, it has a high impact, and the event is retrospectively rationalized as a natural occurrence, even though it is not. Taleb argues that we need to do a better job of preparing for these events; he says that 9/11 and the Pacific disaster in 2005 are results of a lack of foresight for black swan events. 