'Everyone was greedy,' Bernard Madoff told New York magazine.'I just went along' Photo: AP
Posted on 02/28/2011 1:24:38 PM PST by fight_truth_decay
Bernard Madoff, the disgraced financier, accused the investors whose money he lost in a £40 billion Wall Street investment fund of being greedy.
Madoff, who is serving a 150-year prison sentence, also rubbished the financial reforms introduced by the US to prevent future corruption and claimed: "The whole government is a Ponzi scheme".
He added: "These banks and these funds had to know there were problems". "It was a nightmare for me," he said. "Even the regulators felt sorry for me ... They said 'how did you live with this? Not being able to tell anybody?'"
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Yes he did. He had a lot of other people in the financial world looking the “other way” and doing flawless impersonations of Sgt. Schultz... “I see nothink! I hear nothink! I know nothink!”
NO, he really isn’t, is he?
But the fact that others knew, that the TBTF banks were frauds, that MERS is illegal, the question becomes, why just him?
Is he the first of many “Martha Sewart” bones thrown at the public, so we think the “bad guys” got theirs, while the rest get off scot free?
There are a lot more “Bernies” out there, and there is NOTHING stopping them at all from doing some more of this very same thing.
...on charges of running a $7 billion (£4.4bn) Ponzi scheme and needs treatment for drug addiction...to be sent to a medical facility within the US Bureau of Prisons, Federal Medical Center in Butner, NC, where Madoff is serving a 150-year term for defrauding investors of $20 billion. Stanford pleaded not guilty to 21 counts of fraud, money laundering and obstruction and faces up to 375 years in jail if convicted.
Buds for Life?
But Madoff also plays off the usual “talking points”
Sgt. Schultz indeed!! LOL
I hope more Freepers come to realize that the financial services segment of this society has become corrupt. Very corrupt and needs 100 more “Bernies” thrown into jail. Even the TBTF banks.
His talk of being a victim will not play very well with your hard working, underwater mortgage, income tax slave.
But that one sentence IS true.
The government is a ponzi scheme.
So is “social security”.
So is fiat currency, which allows the ponzi to take place.
Without the fiat currency of the FED, the welfare state could NOT exist.
He is not a sympathetic character, but this is correct;
The government is a ponzi scheme.
Many of Madoff’s clients knew he was cheating. They knew his returns were too good for normal market forces. They knew he was cheating somehow. What they never expected was, he was cheaing them.
You can’t cheat an honest man. You bet the reason that Madoff was successful was in very large measure due to the absolute greed of his clients who thought he was cheating others and were fine with that.
You can’t cheat an honest man.
Stephen Spielberg was an investor..
But in another recent story "giving back"..
. Bernard Madoff victims to get $7.2bn from Picower estate
The victims of Bernard Madoff are expected to enjoy their biggest cheer in two years after the estate of Jeffry Picower, one of the fraudster's biggest investors, agreed to return $7.2bn....
There, fixed it for ya, Bernie.
>>>There is something to that. My dad always used to say that you can’t cheat an honest man.<<<
I don’t buy that, honest men get cheated all the time. A con artist might need to run different types of scams on honest men, but they can be cheated. For example, they might use charity scams rather than get rich quick schemes.
From what I understand about Maddoff’s scam, honest men would be more vulnerable to his Ponzi scheme than to most other such schemes. Typcially, Ponzi schemes promise extremely high rates of returns (”We’ll double your money in 6 months”), with dubious or mysterious sources of these profits. A sesnible, honest person should realize that such profits (without tremendous risk) are either next to impossible or illicit.
I believe Maddoff typically offered returns in tne neighborhood of 10% per year, which while high for “safe” inevestments in today’s climate of low interest rates and a shaky stock market, is not so high as to seem “to good to be true”.
Some of the more sophisticated, institutional Maddoff investors probably should have known better, but the average Maddoff investor couldn’t be expected to know. I have a lot more sympathy for them than for people taken in by Nigerian bank scams and other such overtly shady deals.
They'll apparently live out their lives in that facility. It would be funny though if they hated each other.
Mine hasn't..so let's not group all financial services people under the corrupt banner. But comes down to conservative growth; however in the 90's it was like in the gold rush days with the Internet and telecoms( the latter which were never bailed out and never came back to where back should be)
You should be personally involved, everything is run by you, by your financial services person--it's not just getting a statement at the end of the month..you give permission to do what they might suggest..you ask questions.
It's so diversified now, more than ever before, but can do very well, if you are with good people. Being conservative in investments, you may lose out on an up and coming overly fast growing stock, but better safe than sorry. You just go in later is all after it has proved itself. It's long term you are looking at and investment growth under diversification is outside of this country.
I meant more the trading desks of the TBTF banks, not so much the individuals who help people manage money.
To expand, I was also including the mortgage area, MERS, HFT, those kinds of things.
I hope this clarifies my post.
...and then some are lazy ostrich investors...they just want returns, they don't ask how or why something is as it is..they put TRUST in the person that is the "handler" or LAZY TRUST in the friend who referred them..people like to brag when coming into a sweet deal--they want to get their friends in on it--what the friends do not know is that their trusted Golf CC acquaintance or relative has no clue....THEY JUST WANT IN.
The majority of people do not invest that way--if they have any sense about them.
The returning fox knows there will always be more rabbits hanging around the same hole.
Question is..why did a rich man like Speilberg, for instance, with trusted financial [the best] people who have performed for him over the years: need to go rogue with someone like Madoff?
...those reverse mortgages..I see them advertised on tv with some likable debonair washed up actor and think..the actor holds no clue to the bad advice given with these things...and people trust the messenger and the ads continue to run.
It would be a lot funnier if they became partners in the biggest scam in the history of the world.
Well, I tend to be a person who likes to generalize, because dealing with tiny nit pick issues misses the bigger picture.
Sometimes it can be taken personally, which I try not to do.
And I HATE those reverse mortgage ads, too.
Sucking older Americans dry of ANY equity they might have.
Just plain evil, in my book.
a) I was taught the same thing by my parents; ie, “You cannot cheat an honest man.”
b) Part of that lesson was “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Anyone offering you a free lunch is trying to get something out of you. Always. There are NO exceptions.” An honest man knows what is an “honest return” or an “honest wage.”
c) Madoff’s returns were “modest” compared to dot-com equity returns, yes, but put in the perspective of long-term, sustainable returns of “safe” investments, they were very high - like DOUBLE what the real market returns for such claimed risks.
Moreover, for the strategy he claimed to employ, the returns were impossible, because his mythical returns showed almost no perceptible correlation to rather large market volatility. To achieve this is nearly impossible, requiring market timing of an omniscient being.
d) Madoff was promising these higher-than-long-term-average returns with a consistency that was unheard of. You can achieve Madoff-like consistency with much lower returns using Treasury notes and bonds, but not with equities. Using Treasury notes and bonds won’t get you to even half of Madoff’s supposed returns.
e) As Harry Markopolos noted, a “line that goes up and to the right without any deviation is a something out of geometry class, not financial markets.” Investment “professionals” know this. The “sophisticated” investors in Madoff’s fund should have known this was a scam within five to 10 minutes of looking at his claimed returns and his claimed methods of achieving them. Markopolos went further, looking for the footprints of a $50 billion fund in the options markets.... and found NOTHING. There simply isn’t enough liquidity in OEX options to allow a $50B fund to trade without sticking out like a submarine periscope in a bathtub. No complicated access to internal market information was ever necessary to spot this - merely some looking around at option exchange data on OEX stocks showed that the volume necessary for Madoff to actually be doing even 50% of what he claimed was simply not there.
f) Now to your point that “Typically, Ponzi schemes promise extremely high rates of returns...”
Yes, for the amateurs. That gets them busted.
The two recent biggest ponzi schemes have used very modest (by comparison to the small fry) rates of return, coupled with the idea of “safe” returns to suck in investors far and wide into schemes in the billions of dollars that ran over 10 years.
Here’s the OIG investigation for Allen Stanford:
http://www.sec.gov/news/studies/2010/oig-526.pdf
What was he promising?
“The FlexCD Account required a minimum balance of $10,000, had maturities and annual interest rates ranging from one month at 7.25% to 36 months at 10% and withdrawals of up to 25% of the principal amount were allowed without penalties with a five day advance notice. “
That sounds within the realm of the possible, right? 7.25% APR for a one month CD and 10% for 36 months?
Not on stuff with the supposed safety of these investments. The 7.25% APR for a one month CD is astronomically high for that maturity, meaning there’s either significant undisclosed liquidity risk or outright fraud. Turns out, it was the latter.
BTW, in the OIG’s report, you see that the field staff thought that Stanford was a Ponzi scheme as far back as 1997. The enforcement arm of the SEC never pursued a case against Stanford.
The OIG field staff thought Allen Stanford was running an offshore
Ponzi scheme as far back as 1997. The SEC never pursued it.
"Hi there, Americans. Obama put me in charge of the trillion dollar
stimulus. My son and brother are gonna help me disperse the money. "
================================
Fraudster had links to offshore fund run by Bidens
Reuters on Yahoo | 2/23/09 | BY Ajay Kamalakaran
(Reuters) – A fund of offshore hedge funds run by two members of VP Joe Biden's family was marketed exclusively by offshore firms controlled by Texas financier Allen Stanford, charged by regulators with an $8 billion fraud, the Wall Street Journal said.
The Bidens $50 million fund was jointly branded between the Bidens' Paradigm Global Advisors LLC and the offshore Stanford Financial Group entity headquartered in Antigua, and was known as the Paradigm Stanford Capital Management Core Alternative Fund, the paper said. Stanford-related offshore companies marketed the Biden fund to investors and also invested about $2.7 million of their own money in the fund, the paper said, citing a lawyer for Paradigm.
Paradigm Global Advisors is owned through a holding company by the vice president Biden's son, Hunter, and Joe Biden's brother, James, according to the WSJ. Paradigm's attorney, Marc LoPresti, who represents Hunter Biden and James Biden, as well as Paradigm, told the paper he did not know which Stanford entity invested the roughly $2.7 million.
Marc LoPresti, who represents Hunter Biden and James Biden told the paper the Bidens NEVER met or communicated with Stanford. (/snicker)
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
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