Continuing my lonely crusade against willful economic illiteracy in the media, another member of the TPM family repeats Josh Marshall‘s “Ponzi scheme” offense.

This is Zachary Roth writing in TPMMuckraker:

More substantially, Madoff’s alleged Ponzi scheme appears to have been based on using money provided by new investors to make payouts to existing investors.

Dear Zachary, that is pretty much the definition of a Ponzi scheme, you know. In fact, here’s the opening sentence of Wikipedia‘s Ponzi scheme entry:

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors out of the money paid by subsequent investors rather than from profit.

To say that an “Madoff’s alleged Ponzi scheme appears to have been based on using money provided by new investors to make payouts to existing investors” is just like saying “Madoff’s alleged fraud involved stealing money.”