They saved 6.8B seven years ago. If they put that money in broad market index, they already made the fine amount by now and then some.

The discount rate is usually based on a risk free asset. They could have put it in an index and ended up with a 30-40% decline in value as well.

The Renaissance group is pretty well known for exactly the opposite of that, however.

To clarify, the 7.7 billion figure is the 6.8 billion owed plus ~900 million in interest and fines.

Imagine you steal 500 bucks and if caught, the only punishment is to pay back 600 years later.

You'd have be almost certain of getting caught for it to not be a great idea.

Imagine you steal 500 bucks, invest it for 10 years turning it into 1000 dollars, and the punishment is to pay a fine of 700 dollars.

Basically, every ICO, only with much bigger numbers.

That's true, and a part of me wants the penalties to be much higher. On the other hand, people are already scared enough of IRS audits - penalties would make it so much worse.

That's basically an involuntary loan.

After some quick following, the fund had an 71.8% annual return from 1994 through mid 2014. I don't know how the numbers look like nowadays, but assuming that this continued throughout the time in question here, we can conclude that they made a lot of money through this

Id i understood correctly the teick they tried allowed them to treat short term gains as long term. Reducing their tax fron 35% to maybe 20%. So those 6.9 billion was 20% of their profits. Meaning the full amount of their profits were around 35 billion. That's crazy! A money printing machine.