Hey, if it was good enough for Idi and baby doc then its good enough for Madoff. Another emasculating of America will be bailing out the charities. Its actually gotten to the point where they know -- yea, we're doing it and what are you going to do about it! The fix is so elaborate and complete it would make Capone want to hide his head in shame. Next stop, the sentencing, how about- you show us how you did it (...fawn) so we can keep it from ever happening again and your sentence gets reduced. Of course that's the public consumption version. Pissedguy gets my vote for czar.
The latest in a long line of Madoff victims: Another 7bn Ripoff There are a tremendous amount of them in the news everyday, this one just comes to mind on the heels of Marketsurfer's inssitence that Madoff should be allowed to manage OPM's as part of his jail sentence. The man is a complete sociopath, he most likely isn't violent, but it's obvious that he cares nothing about human beings. Hanging's way too good for him.
Here's a list of other Madoff victims. The line goes around the corner I don't know if it includes his sister and nephew (both of whom have to sell all of their belongings and are most likely destitute). We know of at least one death that resulted from this fradulent behavior, another person has gone into hiding for fear of her life and I am sure countless others are facing the potential of working until they meet their maker for a pittance, when before they had been living in the lap of luxury.
Summary: Some rich people were lazy and dumb, didn't diversify, ignored numerous obvious red flags, and put huge amounts of their net worth into an "investment" that screamed scam. They lost it, and are now merely richer than 99% of the world's population, rather than 99.99% as they had been before.
Little know fact on ET, even though the document explaining the issue was posted in a thread. Naturally, 90+% did not read it due to ADD or whatever. Most Madoff investors had no clue they were invested there. It was their FoF managers who kept shuffling money to Madoff while not disclosing it to their investors. Many of these investors knew about Madoff and did not want to touch him. So while Madoff is no angel, the real scumbags are the FoF managers who directly misled their investors. Madoff only worked the FoF managers, who were either in on the scam or were easily duped.
Thanks Cutten. Your comment flies in the fact of Marketsufer's previous statements about hedge fund investors being relative trading sophisticates ... obviously they are not. It seems that even the knowledgeable, professional investors where taken by his pie-in-the-sky talk (come on down and bring all your money ... I'll take care of you). *** Of course while none of these people had the least bit of knowledge about diversification and managing risk, he's still a pretty nasty individual, and really shouldn't be allowed to see the light of day for the rest of his life..
Basically, the skilled professionals who really understood their industry spotted the scam - one guy even reported it to the SEC from 1999 and several years after, but gave up after years of no response from the authorities. Those funds of funds who knew their stuff all refused to invest due to red flags they spotted at the time. The mediocre professionals who were only good at marketing, palm-greasing, or fee-taking did not - they got suckered because they were either too lazy, too dumb, or too gullible/naive to realise that fraud is a risk whenever you give someone money to look after. Now the ones who invested say 5-10% of their money with Madoff made a mistake, but it was not a big mistake. They would have lost much more if they had just gone long stocks last year. If the big losers had just diversified properly, even with no due diligence at all, they would have only lost 5%, 10% or so. So there were two chances to avoid a serious loss - first, by doing due diligence properly. Second, by diversifying. Only people who ignored *both* those core tenets of investing got fleeced. Note that even someone who invested 70% of their net worth with Madoff, and put the rest in US Treasuries, would still be rich by normal standards. To go up to that full 95-100% is just utterly insane. I do agree fully about Madoff as a person. The irony is that it was totally unnecessary, he could easily have been rich just by staying legit. He became head of the nasdaq after all. Anyway, IMO there's a good chance he will either be killed in prison, or commit suicide. The Feds will have to put him in solitary for his own protection if they want to avoid that.
Did you read the story about the woman who invested her life savings with Madoff, on her uncle's recommendation, and is now working as a maid to pay her bills? Remind me again why the fund of fund managers are the real scumbags here. Your moral compass is pretty fucked up if you think Madoff isn't the villain of this piece.