Then, all you have to do is fade me. You'll make a fortune. I figure until about the time they mark the books for the year. then, what do you do for the encore? Extreme alarmist? Use the search feature, and hope I'm as wrong as I have been right. I don't make the stuff up. This isn't something I picked out of my ass. It is factual. It is what is happening. How can you call anyone an alarmist when the financial landscape looks like the moon? I certainly take a harder look at things I might have thought a bit looney a few years ago. But I do have to say, it's pretty easy for me to look at the news flow, and figure what's next. Have you noticed, as much as I badgered the SEC over the years, did you see the din pickup this afternoon, when the folks realized they were there, and let this whole thing pass? Search 'SEC' with "Madoff" and see what you get. SEC/DC political. That's what you need to know. Now look what we were talking about a few weeks ago. I believe you'll have to see arrests of personnel at the SEC. The public won't allow these transgressions to go unanswered. This is from today's WSJ Law Journal: An executive in the securities industry, Harry Markopolos, contacted the SEC's Boston office in May 1999, urging regulators to investigate Mr. Madoff. Mr. Markopolos continued to pursue his accusations over the past nine years, he said in an interview on Thursday, and according to documents he sent to the SEC that were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. "Bernie Madoff's returns aren't real and if they are real, then they would almost certainly have been generated by front-running customer order flow from the broker-dealer arm of Madoff Investment Securities LLC," Mr. Markopolos wrote to the SEC in November 2005. The SEC declined to comment on the matter. Hello!!!!! Anyone home??? What 's the problem here???
No hints. Remind me. It'll be public in a few days, and when it is, I'll elaborate for you. But I don't want to frontrun the fun.
A few people were skeptical of him because of the steadiness of his returns. Not because of grand claims, but because of the steadiness. They didn't believe it was possible. This is from the New York Times: It also mentioned a Massachusetts charity that had it's entire endowment with Madoff. They said they will have to close down. Even though I don't know what kind of charity it was, this is horrible. We're also finding out that he had been investigated in the past and nobody found anything wrong. I find it unlikely that he was writing clean business in the begining, and then turned to running a Ponzi later on. I'm pretty sure he was scamming all along. The people who investigated him before, apparently the SEC did it once, and Spitzer did it once, must have missed it somehow.
The crazy thing - and also in hindsight highly suspicious - is that he only charged trading commissions, no performance fees. Performance fees were charged by the feeder funds such as Fairfield and Kingate that served no other purpose than charging fees and funneling funds to Madoff. That's were the villas and boats must be looked for. Those guys will be killed with lawsuits for charging billions in fees over the years for what has turned out to be one giant scam (that they were not but possibly could have been aware of).
Many rich Jews from Palm Beach and New York City were totally wiped out as well as Jewish charitable organizations. Was Bernie Madoff a closet anti-semite?