NORB VONNEGUT

This month former stockbroker turned financial blogger and thriller writer Norb Vonnegut releases his second novel, The Gods of Greenwich. With this story Vonnegut, who is the cousin of deceased American literature legend Kurt, feeds our fears about the global market with his malicious power brokers. In this exclusive interview, Vonnegut chats with RT’s Web Editor Morgan Doremus about the state of America’s economy, some of the craziest Wall Street stunts he’s ever heard about and what readers can expect from him next!

What happens in book club stays in book club, right? I had a blast with my new friends from South Salem yesterday. Many thanks for inviting me to visit with your group.

Last Thursday, I visited the Chappaqua Library where we discussed The Gods of Greenwich, Top Producer, and a condition known as “prosopagnosia.” Great audience and world-class chocolate chip cookies.

People email me all kinds of things. Photos. Gossip from Wall Street. Viral jokes. About anything you can imagine. Sometimes I get stuff from the wrong side of barbed-wire fences.

Like today. There’s an exclusive photo of Bernie Madoff inside. It arrived fifteen minutes ago from the federal correctional complex in Butner, North Carolina.

During my years in wealth management, I kept my eyes and ears open for financial fraud. Protecting clients was the name of the game. And many of my professional observations about fraud now appear in Top Producer—a novel about a Ponzi scheme I sold to my publisher twelve months before Madoff confessed in December 2008.

So how can we spot Ponzi schemes before getting sucked in?

Here are the red flags I published on The Huffington Post last year. My top ten list won’t make Letterman. But the purpose isn’t to be funny. It’s to help you identify the bad guys through “touch and feel” rather than in-depth knowledge of the capital markets.