Extracted links to other NYP articles:
Jewish Circuit's Faith Is Shaken
Florida Elite Loses Its Juice
Alarm Bells In 1999 Ignored
A Life Built On 'Bull'
Keystone Kop Of Wall St. [Spitzer]
Charity Trustee's A Bustee [Robert Lappin]
Not that it’s relevant, but I wonder how many Obama supporters were caught up in this? I suspect quite a few based on the description of the investors.
What? Someone is finally unraveling Social Security?
I’m sure that there are plenty of real victims here, but I cannot help but chuckle at the people who have $5M+ and cannot live off a safe 5% return-but need to chase the BIG YIELDS...when I have not even one tenth of that amount and would never trust a person...no matter who with that money.
This still smells rotten to me. Think about it, a 70-year old man sets up his sons and probably every other living relative he has for life. He lives a life of luxury for the majority of his adult life then, as things start to unravel, he “confesses” to his sons who then turn him in. He is the only one to take a fall and everyone else does fine. If you have to take a fall it sounds like a pretty good deal. Someone still has enough left to put up his $10 million dollar bail. It seems like crime not only pays it pays well.
If you have money and do stupid things with it, your stupid.
If you give money to somone that does stupid things with it, your still stupid.
These people are not going to bed hungry, I have no sympathy. If they were mostly Dem supporters, well then I’m happy for thier loss. But they are still stupid.
Ooops - he forgot about social security.
Not to worry. The Anointed One will put gas in your car and pay your mortgage. On top of that, he's going to create 2 million construction jobs to rebuild our infrastructure, so all you need is a hard hat and steel toed boots and you've got a job.
Successful people, people who knew how to read financial statements, people who knew better were taken in by the hundreds. Madoff is one helluva salesman.
Ahhh yes, gotta keep the street riff raff with only $100,000 to invest out of there... Speaking for stree riff-raff everywhere - thank you, thank you.
MSM continues not to be able to get very simple facts strait.
This is nowhere near as big a Ponzi scheme as social security.
This guy stole $50 billion and Fox News - the putatively Republican network - spent all night drilling down in the story of that missing girl in Florida. People, if we’re ever going to have an economy again, we need some perspective.
Defrauded investors shouldn’t be worried. I am sure the federal government will bail out their losses.
“He was a big liberal Democrat donor and so were many of individuals who invested money in his fund for management. “
Gee thats too bad. Still it was a better investment than their donations to BO.
Bernie is such a good Democrat. He contributed to endless Democrat candidates including Barrack Hussein Obama.
Throw the whole family in jail and put Bernie in the electric chair. Lautenberg aka “the Mummy” was a big investor.
You know what the dirty stinking secret is - Madoff first business or main business was market making in stocks. The stories are not telling you that most investors thought Bernie was essentially front running his order flow to get such good returns (i.e. cheating).
This means his traders could see big block of say IBM being bought and Bernie’s traders would trade ahead or buy before those trades were executed. This could boost returns. If you had some pretty sophisticated softwrae this is one way Bernie could have cheated to get an edge - if he had been smart enough.
In other words his investors thought Bernie was engaging in illegal actions to get an edge on the market. Well he was but they were not the illegal acts his investors expected! It was their little secret unfortunately it was not the secret they expected.
From the article..
***Said one hedge-fund manager who knew many of Madoff’s investors: “There are a lot of people in New York who were rich yesterday and are insolvent today.” ****
Well, flipping burgers ain’t out of style! Get a job!
What a fine group of people to defraud!
I actually have a little first hand information about this.
My mother (CPA) had a client (older man passed last year) who was invested in this fund for years.
She says that it was a very strange fund. The end of year documents were literally hand written 1099s with a printout of buy/sells. The worst part for her was that they sales didn’t have the cost basis included. At some point she told the client, it just isn’t worth the aggravation.
So they found a 3rd party who specialized in creating the reports necessary for doing tax returns specifically for this fund.
Anyway, she always thought it was strange that the accounting materials didn’t conform to normal trading reports. She even questioned the legitimacy of the fund.
Here is the kicker though. The fund didn’t report ridiculous returns. She remembers it as 12-14%. Also, she thinks most, if not all, of the “trades” were treasury bonds. The returns were plausible.
Anyway, my parents live in Palm Beach and know that a lot of the limousine libs they know are personally hurt. Someone I know, who is a born into wealth Obama nut told us last night her family may have lost everything.
Personally, I expect a bailout. It sounds stupid, but it wasn’t just individuals who invested in this thing. It was colleges, other funds, hospitals, etc. The downstream impact is going to hit a lot more people than some wealthy left-wing nuts.
I want to be clear that I don’t want a bailout. But, I would bet one will happen. ‘Tis the season.