I am sure he "saw" real returns on a very real looking app or website. As we transition to a cashless society we are all getting use to the numbers on our computers and phones representing real money.
My paystub is digital, it goes into my bank account directly and the numbers on my computer go up. I spend money by taping a computer chip onto another computer chip and then the numbers in my bank account drop. I can also digitally transfer those numbers to a brokerage account and click a few buttons and then the numbers go up and down depending on how people are feeling about the stock market. In the past few years, seemingly always up, which I think is priming young or naive investors to believe investments never fail.
Exactly: "Hanes told Mitchell a confusing story. Not long ago, Hanes explained, he started investing in cryptocurrencies with the help of some people he met online. First, he and his partners deposited money on a reputable U.S. platform for buying and selling crypto. The profits were enormous, he said: He took out his phone to show Mitchell his account balance, which seemed to indicate that the investment was worth $40 million."
Crypto is great for scams even beyond it's infrastructural advantages because a lot of people made a ton of money from investing money they couldn't afford to lose in things that were pretty indistinguishable from the actual scams.
This nuance lost on the common cryptocurrency speculator given that they have no idea what cryptocurrency actually is or how it's supposed to work.
The fact that you're even arguing this point shows how easy it is for people to fall for this crap.
Anyone can make a real looking app that makes it look like you're making money when they've already stolen all your money and spent it on hookers and coke on yachts.
Not anyone can start a real bank in the US, and if they can, you generally have protections in place to not need to worry the bank is that egregiously fraudulent.
Investments fail, there are plenty in the news. Broad market indices, however, don’t fail. There have been numerous bailouts over the previous decades. Why would one assume any future government wouldn’t continue bailouts if all the previous ones did?
When the organization is as big as the U.S. government and has as good credit as the U.S. did in 2008, you can save an awful lot of financial institutions. But if it gets to the point where everybody expects to be bailed out and people start acting accordingly, you can't. Eventually the government ends up falling, as people start realizing that the economy isn't actually working and everybody is just cooking the books with financial transactions.
Government policy makers know this, and their livelihood is dependent upon the continued existence of the government, and so at some point they declare "Nope, bailout is not going to happen this time. You're on your own." At that point, the last group of people who took stupid financial risks are left holding the bag. It's very much like a pyramid scheme: the going is good as long as you can find a greater fool to assume the risk from you, but at some point there are no greater fools, and you find out the greater fool was you.
Isn’t that all the policy makers, old voters, taxpayer funded DB pension funds, etc that depend on broad market equity index fund returns?
Obviously, the system breaks down when it breaks down (when the currency has no purchasing power left to lose), but until then, the entire political apparatus is incentivized to bail out asset prices.
And if that isn’t possible, then the status of your investments/brokerage/bank accounts is going to be the least of your worries, as you will have more immediate concerns about procuring food/energy/shelter/security.
The Crisis of the Third Century, which starts in 235, is where the inflection point between "broadly stable" and "broadly negative" sets in, and the shocks both of the Crisis of the Third Century and the Plague of Justinian are each larger than the shock of the deposing of the last Western Roman Emperor.
However, the point I was trying to make is that Rome's decline sure lasted a very long time indeed.
Additionally, 235 being so important is only obvious in hind-sight. To anyone living in the Empire in 235, I suspect it felt an awful lot like the Year of the Five Emperors (about as far away from 235 as Diocletian is the other direction) and it wasn't until a while later that it became clear that no Septimus Severus type was going to be able to put it all back together quickly.
How long to you have to live, to see a return?
235 to 285 were tumultuous times, civil war and all that goes with it