Here are three of the week’s top pieces of financial insight, gathered from around the web:
A scam turns into a shoot-out
The FBI is investigating an alleged Ponzi scheme that became violent when one of the salesmen turned his gun on federal agents, said Ben Foldy in The Wall Street Journal. After being shot twice by the SWAT team called to his Las Vegas home, Matthew Beasley confessed that the “high-return, zero-risk investment plan” he helped pitch to investors was a fraud. “Investors, the majority of them Mormons,” were solicited to help finance a company that made “short-term loans to people awaiting payouts from settled personal-injury lawsuits.” They claimed payouts were 12.5 percent a year and not a single loan of the “over 16,000 in six-plus years” had gone bad. Nate Anderson, founder of the Hindenburg Research firm that uncovered the fraud through a citizen sting operation, called it “the most obvious Ponzi scheme we’ve ever seen.”
Getting money from your home
With property values at historic highs, it’s not a bad time to consider ways to tap your home equity, said Alexis Leondis in Bloomberg — if you do it safely. “If you’re looking to do home renovations” that could upgrade the value of your home, opening a home equity line of credit “can be prudent.” It may “feel scary to borrow against equity that magically appeared in the past year,” but banks are providing more guardrails than in the past. Most home equity credit lines come with adjustable interest rates…
