Kim Rossi

Bernie Madoff: How much will we learn? Will we ever learn?

I've heard of one family, an elderly couple, who have lost everything but their home because of Bernie Madoff. 88 is elderly, right?

How does a person dupe so many intelligent people for so long. Are we really all that greedy? Lazy? Trusting?

I remember when Mark was a member of a golf club. Our lawyer was a member. So was our insurance guy. And our Merrill Lynch guy. It's the way life works - we develop relationships and trust and then work with people. We all do it. WASPS, Jews, Italians, Asians, Irish - we tend to gravitate to people whose names sound like our own, don't we?

I feel for the more average Joe's who've lost their life savings. Like the carpet salesman who had a million dollars for retirement. And it's gone.

Here's an article from GAWKER (which has totally topped Perez for me, it's more erudite and NY'y) about Madoff's Niece who married an SEC lawyer. Now there's an INSIDE job..... Ponzi Schemers Label Whoring Niece Married SEC Lawyer.

Then there's this piece from NYT's Tom Friedman:

The stranger, a Western businessman, slipped into the chair next to me at an Asia Society lunch here in Hong Kong and asked me a question that I can honestly say I’ve never been asked before: “So, just how corrupt is America?”

His question was occasioned by the arrest of the Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff on charges of running a Ponzi scheme that bilked investors out of billions of dollars, but it wasn’t only that. It’s the whole bloody mess coming out of Wall Street — the financial center that Hong Kong moneymen had always looked up to. How could it be, they wonder, that such brand names as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and A.I.G. could turn out to have such feet of clay? Where, they wonder, was our Securities and Exchange Commission and the high standards that we had preached to them all these years?

One of Hong Kong’s most-respected bankers, who asked not to be identified, told me that the U.S.-owned investment company where he works made a mint in the last decade cleaning up sick Asian banks. They did so by importing the best U.S. practices, particularly the principles of “know thy customers” and strict risk controls. But now, he asked, who is there to look to for exemplary leadership?

“Previously, there was America,” he said. “American investors were supposed to know better, and now America itself is in trouble.....

Read the rest HERE.