

Bernard Madoff’s Courtroom Confession About His Ponzi Scheme - jeremynolan
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601170&refer=special_report&sid=aPIRfDAqvRy8
This is clearly a reason greed is not that good.
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tokenadult
The statement was drafted with the help of his lawyer, undoubtedly, and
according to people who heard it delivered in the courtroom, the expression in
his voice and his demeanor didn't match his words. There is also evidence from
the federal investigation in his business office that suggests the scheme went
on much longer than Madoff has admitted. In other words, the confession is
just more lies to cover his ass. I have less respect for him than ever after
reading the statement.

And it's ludicrous to compare a guy who steals from a charity for Holocaust
survivors to leading business founders. Madoff is as completely venal as
anyone who has ever been convicted of a business crime anywhere.

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Spyckie
It makes me wonder if he is pleading guilty to a ponzi scheme to hide
something more criminal... I mean, taking investors' money and putting it in a
bank is the least wrong you can do - you could just downright spend it, or use
it in all manner of ways that could be off record and hidden by a 'fake split
strike conversion' strategy.

Who knows, he may have been this close to curing cancer before investigators
came in...

~~~
vinutheraj
Ofcourse he spent it. Where else can the money be gone ?!He just kept it in
the bank to see it and bask in the glory !!

Does anybody know how much money he has with him, I mean, will anybody who
invested with him get anything at all back ?! I mean where did all the 50
billion go ?

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patrickg-zill
I find it completely unbelievable at this point that one man could execute a
fraud on this scale for some 15 years or more.

Just producing the paperwork that was sent to each investor on a monthly basis
would be more than a full time job. Add to that the lengthy SEC filings, etc.

And he was not working full time - he spent a lot of time schmoozing either in
NYC or Palm Beach.

~~~
defen
I know someone who works for a ~1 billion dollar fund, and he says that
mailing out (legit) quarterly reports on time is a 10-person job. So there's
no way Madoff falsified a 65-billion dollar fund by himself.

~~~
tlb
Sending out legit reports must take manpower to collect all the data. But fake
reports might be easy to generate semi-automatically.

I'm sure you're right, though: a lot of people must have been in on it, and
he's covering for them.

~~~
jhancock
yep...another reason against "secret" banking. Privacy is good, but should be
limited to within the bounds of non-criminal behavior. In his "confession" he
talks about the vast amounts of money sitting in Chase Manhattan Bank. Noone
can park billions in a bank without the bank CEO knowing about it and closely
monitoring what the depositor is doing (or not doing).

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cedsav
What I find hard to understand is why he did not even try to invest the money.

He had a parallel, successful and legit investment business, so it's not like
he didn't know how to do it. He could have prolonged the scheme (and made it
harder to detect) by doing real trades and just inflating the rate of return.

Was he just trying to get caught all these years?

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jeremynolan
Those who are very greedy should read that.

~~~
byrneseyeview
Madoff is going to spend the rest of his life broke and in jail. For someone
as rich as he was, he didn't live that swanky a lifestyle, and gave a lot to
charity. Meanwhile, fantastically greedy people like Buffett and Gates are
still out of jail and enjoying what they do.

Dishonest people with an insatiable need to be loved and accepted should read
this. Unfortunately, they're generally told that their instincts are virtuous
enough to compensate for the harm they cause, just as greedy people are told
that they are so evil it negates the wealth they create.

~~~
alexbosworth
Bill Gates and Buffet don't live that swanky a lifestyle considering the size
of their wealth, and the amount they have pledged to charity is unprecedented.

~~~
gnaritas
Only because their fortunes are equally huge. They could give a lot more.
Looking at Gates, I feel like his foundation is nothing more than a shelter
for his money, he only gives just enough to meet the legal requirement for a
foundation and invests the bulk of it to keep the fortune growing.

~~~
jacoblyles
From previous threads, I know you don't like rich people and are personally
offended by income inequality. But attacking one of the world's largest
charitable benefactors for not doing enough in your not-so-humble estimation
strikes me as petty.

Gates has the wisdom and guts to tackle such unsexy causes as malaria in the
third world. Because Bill Gates exists, there is substantially less suffering
in the world. That's not something you can say about many individuals with any
confidence.

We could take away his money and spread it among the masses, but I guarantee
you those masses would not use his money in nearly as useful ways. We could
take away his money and spend it through the government, but the government
already has much larger aid programs that do much less good.

I understand criticizing Gates for his business practices. But attacking him
for how he chooses to fight malaria - it boggles my mind.

Do you have any EVIDENCE that Gates is being anything less than sincere in his
charitable projects?

~~~
gnaritas
> From previous threads, I know you don't like rich people

You are mistaken.

> and are personally offended by income inequality

No, just excessive income inequality. There's something wrong with a system
that allows one individual to amass more wealth than the bottom 40% of the
population combined. That's a broken system that's far too tilted to favor the
individual over the society as a whole. I don't have anything against rich
people, I have something against the system that allows it to such excess.

Stating my opinion is not _attacking_ , all I said was they could give more,
which is a fact. The foundation is required to give 5% a year to avoid most
taxes, which seems to be all they give, investing the other 95% to grow the
endowment without taking into consideration of the harm that 95% could be
bringing to the world...

[http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-
gatesx0...](http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-
gatesx07jan07,0,6827615.story?coll=la-home-headlines)

That strikes me as them being more worried about making money than actually
helping people.

> but I guarantee you those masses would not use his money in nearly as useful
> ways

No you can't, you can only guess.

> But attacking him for how he chooses to fight malaria - it boggles my mind.

You have a strange definition of attacking. I didn't attack them, and I'm not
dissing the good they do but it's being blind to not see that they don't do as
much as they can, they do as much as the law requires them too. That says
something whether you want to see it or not.

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spoiledtechie
Looks to me he is a honestly sad man.

~~~
zzkt
only because he got caught.

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gojomo
Whatever the hints of further covering by Madoff in this statement, will
anyone from AIG make similarly stark admissions? For example:

 _Your honor, for years I sold investment 'insurance' policies that I knew
would have no hope of paying off in exactly that situation where they would
have been most valuable, a general deleveraging and asset price bust. Rather
than creating suitable reserves and hedges with collected premiums, I paid
myself and my employees richly. By systematically underpricing the
'guarantees' I was offering, I engaged in unfair competition, ensuring my firm
a disproportionate amount of the global business in our markets.

I had full knowledge that in the case of a serious business reversal, the
implicit 'systemic' guarantees by US federal institutions would cover our
obligations. Thus, for years before the eventuality of tangible federal
payment -- an eventuality my outsized and reckless business practices made
certain except in the precise timing -- I was enriching myself by fraudulent
misappropriation of federal funds._

