Posted on 12/16/2008 7:22:04 AM PST by marshmallow
About nine years ago, Frank Casey went to New York to check out the competition and came away unimpressed with Bernard Madoff.
Casey was vice president of marketing for Rampart Investment Management in Boston, one of the country's top firms specializing in investing in options. Madoff, at the time, was earning a reputation on Wall Street as a can't-miss money manager who used options strategies to produce double-digit returns without blemish.
But from what Casey saw in 1999, Madoff's system did not make sense.
"Either he wasn't doing what he said he was doing, or maybe he was using the clients' money to help his own positions," Casey recalled in an interview yesterday.
When he reported back to colleagues at Rampart, one in particular grew determined to unravel Madoff's mysterious investment strategy - portfolio manager Harry Markopolos. And when he couldn't, Markopolos undertook a crusade against Madoff that started with asking officials at the Boston office of the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate him.
Now an executive recruiter, Markopolos declined to be interviewed. But what regulators did - and did not do - in response to Markopolos's entreaties is a now a burning question for the agency, after Madoff's arrest last week on charges of running a Ponzi scheme that lost up to $50 billion, perhaps the largest in history.
The SEC and other authorities say Madoff confessed to running a Ponzi scheme - paying one set of clients with money from another - cheating dozens of investors, including some of the most prominent families in Massachusetts, out of millions. The charges came after Madoff allegedly confessed to employees of his own firm.
Madoff's attorney didn't return messages yesterday.
The SEC did conduct two inquiries of Madoff, in 2005 and 2007. The agency did not find any major problems.....
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
I didn’t say that prosecutors, much less jurors, should be financially incentivized. But financial fraud investigators should be. And I didn’t suggest a “quota system” for anyone. You don’t need one if people are being well-compensated in direct relation to how much fraud they uncover. Quotas are for salaried employees, like police officers writing traffic tickets.
The pay differential between senior positions at the SEC and Fed, and the senior positions at the hedge funds and institutions that urgently need investigating, is mind-bogglingly huge. Several years ago, I knew a young woman who graduated from a top college with top grades in economics, and went to work for the Fed right out college, thinking the salary they offered her was just fine. Within 3 months she’d come to her senses. She stuck around for a year or two, went and picked up a PhD in economics, and went to work in the private sector.
The smartest people won’t work for 5-10% of their market value, so we end up with the dumb and/or unmotivated ones doing the investigating, and the brilliant and/or determined ones running the financial institutions and hedge funds. Not hard to see why the catch rate is so low.
I was only here to raise the question about Roosevelt being involved in a Ponzi scheme. No one has made that case but many have made noise.
This statement does not put the responsibility for a ponzi scheme on Roosevelt. It says it developed into. Earlier I said I thought LBJ.
I wish someone would address that point and not provide incessant lectures on the follies of the FDR administration.
So far we have exchanged several posts and you have presented nothing that indicates Roosevelt engaged in a ponzi scheme. I asume you're still thinking about it.
I certainly have. Repeatedly. In small words. Perhaps our definitions of Ponzi schemes differ. I’m not going to bother responding to any more posts.
Thank you. I welcome relief from the incessant non-answers. When you can show evidence of Roosevelt’s responsibility, then perhaps you’ll ping me. In the meantime, you might refrain from posting comments you can’t support.
I haven’t posted any non supportable comments. The logic is perfectly clear, especially after having been repeated in three slightly different ways. Perhaps you should read them again. Good day.
Madoff's investors would have doubled their money every 7 to 9 years. I have to assume NO ONE is going to bail out people who doubled their money in this scam, right?
Still unsupportable. What is a revolving door funding scheme and what does that have to do with anything?
As for your comment that a separate fund means it was still a ponzi scheme. Please support that with facts and not your LOGIC, since everything I've read for the last ten years says that if the fund were left alone it would have been okay.
Here's your opportunity to come clean. Just say these words and I'll move on. "I bought into lazy thinking and what I heard on the radio and saw here. I thought it would be cute to post an anti-Roosevelt reply because everyone here knows what a bad guy he was. I thought I'd get away with it and no one would challenge me. I'm sorry."
Read the book that I referenced earlier.
I would quote specifics but I do not currently have access to the book.
FDR knew damn well what was being setting up, and how the public was being deceived into accepting it.
Consider yourself pinged.
You might find this John Fund column from the WSJ interesting By All Means Try Something'
Here is one interesting part:
FDR himself said in a speech at Oglethorpe University that "this country needs . . . bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."
I suspect that, whatever his views might be on personal accounts today, FDR would have little use for liberals who attack them without any suggestions of their own on how to "try something."
Actually, the article has information to support both sides of this discussion That being:
a) FDR was step one in the creation of a program that evolved into system that would be considered illegal, if proposed or practiced by a private enterprise (my opinion).
b) SS, as proposed under FDR, evolved independently of him, to become the monster it has. FDR had no way of predicting or knowing that this would occur. (which I think is a position you would concur with)
OK, here is another interesting article:
The Social Security Ponzi scheme
Here is an excerpt:
the first American to ever receive a check from this new national savings plan was Ernest Ackerman, a streetcar motorman from Cleveland, Ohio who retired exactly one day after the program went into effect. For the five cents that was deducted from Mr. Ackerman's check the sole day he was a 'participant', he received a lump—sum payment of 17 cents. This was a 240% return, which annualizes out to 87,600%. Nice investing, Ernie.
Then, in 1939, a series of changes were made to this new retirement system that included moving up the start of monthly payments by two years. As a result, the first monthly Social Security check went out on January 31, 1940 to Ida May Fuller, a retired legal secretary from Ludlow, Vermont.
This maiden disbursement was $22.54, which, according to Social Security Online, after cost of living increases and 35 years of receipts until her death in 1975, totaled a startling $22,888.92 in payments from a system to which Mrs. Fuller contributed $24.75.
Now, please bear in mind that Mr. Ponzi was only promising people a 40% return on their money in 90 days. By contrast, the first Social Security recipients received yields approaching 100,000 percent.
It’s not a ponzi scheme to grandfather people in and adjust the benefit to fit the income. It’e merely welfare and taking care of the current need. In fact, the second action would be counter to a ponzi scheme.
Nothing in what your reply shows that Roosevelt started a ponzi scheme. In fact the last pooint supports the conclusion that he did not.
A smart man would say that. A wise man would know that it would turn into a monster.
I really do not understand your refusal to not see this. I have also referenced you to other articles and a book.
You need to do some research on the subject.
I believe fully that FDR knew exactly what he was creating.
I will concede one point though in FDR's favor, that being that he expected future politicians to improve the system instead of making it worse.
Nothing in my post was intended to do so. The purpose of the post was to refer you to an article that does. Read the article, the other article, and the book.
If you do so, you should then be convinced that FDR is undeserving of the raptures he receives for being an economical genius and the Saviour of America from the wrath of the Great Depression.
They not only have managed to improve the system, they have successfully turned back efforts by Reagan and Bush thatwould have decimated SS over time.
Socialism has been the goal, Social Security is simply one of the tools to achieve the goal.
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