Watching the evening news, there was an additional fact. When Madoff said, “I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme. As the years went by I realized that my arrest and this day would inevitably come,” what he was referring to was that his scheme started in the
Early 1990s recession that followed the
1987 Stock Market Crash [
Black Monday]. Madoff apparently faked it through that recession thinking he could retrieve his losses, but never caught up. It’s unclear when “I never invested the funds in securities as promised,” started.
While in no way exonerating Madoff, this proposed timeline would be more explanatory. "Ponzi-ing" through a Recession to hold on to his customers would have put him way, way behind the eight-ball. The problem with this explanation [“I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme”] is that there’s not much evidence that he even tried to recoup his losses [“I never invested the funds in securities as promised”]. I suppose if you’re running a Ponzi Scheme, the period from 1990 until the collapse in 2008 was fertile ground. There was a big Bull Market with only a light recession in 2002-2003.
But even more than that, this was the era of the coming of the Derivatives, the Hedge Funds, the bubble parade [Enron, World.com, Dot.com, Housing, Oil], deregulation – enough financial sheenanigans so there was plenty of room in the cracks for Madoff to hide in.
But more than his getting away with running a massive Ponzi Scheme for almost two decades, the part that lingers is his willingness to do it- to play the big-shot and live the Life of Riley at the expense of his friends, his mentors, and his social network. None of us can get our minds around that. That he could do it by hiring a bunch of low-level employees and some bootleg storefront accountant under the nose of the SEC/CFTC says something terrible about our system. But that he would do it will make him an enigma hidden in a paradox for eternity. And his wife’s attempting to hold on to a $7M Manhattan penthouse and $70M in other assets, claiming that it didn’t come from his fraud indicates that she is part of the whole thing in some as yet unexplained way.
Where is the Rosebud in this story?
I know everyone is looking for a villain to explain away this economic pile of waste we are all watching. But because Madoff is a symptom in no way excuses him. I hope his fraudulent attempts to shield the residence and cash for his spouse puts her in jail for the rest of her days too. I almost feel like that AFTER they are gone, the black waters will cover this and people will forget about it. This would be a good time to have people see some photographs of how the high/mighty have fallen. Perhaps some youtube video of Madoff not exactly enjoying himself during what looks to be the rest of his life behind bars. It is a shame Ken Lay died because it would have been a good example. Angry, yeah I am. It is funny when John Stewart takes Jim Cramer to task using his own words. But what I’d really like to see is him answering people he advised to buy Bear Stearns days before they plummeted.