Wildcat

  • Perhaps no abuse in recent years has been productive of more financial loss than than the sale of stock in wildcat insurance enterprises...  (p88)

1912-0, NAIC Proceedings

  • Nor are financial panics the only cause for concern.
  • Financial markets have also long exhibited a vulnerability to manipulation, swindles, and fraud, including:
    • William Duer’s notorious attempt to corner the market for United States government bonds in 1791–92,
    • ⇒  the ‘‘wildcat’’ life insurance companies of the early nineteenth century (which took premiums from customers but disappeared before paying any claims), 
    • the infamous pyramiding scheme of Charles Ponzi in 1920,
    • and the highly suspect practices of New York’s National City Bank and its chairman, Charles Mitchell, in the runup to the Great Crash of 1929.
    • The apparent massive Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff that has recently unraveled in 2008 is only the latest in a long series of such financial scandals.  (p7-8)

2009 02 - COP - Report - Modernizing the American Financial Regulatory System, Congressional Oversight Panel - 118p