First, at least his big scheme wasn't "fake it till you make it"; it was explicitly and intentionally criminal from the beginning.
Second, I doubt whether serial delusions of grandeur would be unanimously lauded on HN.
Second, I doubt whether serial delusions of grandeur would be unanimously lauded on HN.
He would just need to stop there and focus on managing the central bank instead of A&M bank
Although A&M bank could have become one of the most respected investment banks given its connection.
Almost all of which have similar origins (and ongoing operations) in something lucrative and unsavory.
So you either win or you lose. He lost after being so close to winning. My lack of admonishment comes from my main observation that he could have stopped before starting A&M bank and been indistinguishable from any other well off person. He was a respected business leader at the time.
I doubt he would have succeeded nevertheless. In the end the law was changed to apply to him retroactively, which was unconstitutional (and I'm sure it's still unconstitutional on most parts of the world), and that only to give him more sentence time. He would have been removed from the bank, one way or another.
Whether it was HSBC’s opium trading
Or JP Morgan Chase’s fraudulent securities offering for a water company that decided to operate as a bank
There are lots of examples of maneuvering towards legal legitimacy
It really just depends on where your ambitions lie and what consequences you are willing to risk.
(note: all those banks are now results of many mergers and hardly represent their oldest branches)