Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Some of the Carbon Credits Were Fake

Carbon credits

The thing about most traditional financial frauds is that they have to end. You get money from investors, you spend it on watches and gambling, you tell the investors their money is safe and earning 10% returns each month, you keep going for a while, eventually the investors ask for all that money back and you don’t have it. There are delaying mechanisms — you can do a Ponzi and get new investors to pay off the old ones — but eventually you will run out of time.

The problem is that you have promised your investors money, and it is ...