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Bernie Madoff has died

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11–20 of 406 posts

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#11
post #8

The scapegoat. The only one who ripped off the rich instead of the poor. I would like to see people like Paul Singer die in prison, who made the lives of millions of people miserable, but I guess it's all legal what he did...

Scamming rich people is not exclusive of scamming poor people unfortunately. Poor always, always pay the bill.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#12
post #8

The scapegoat. The only one who ripped off the rich instead of the poor. I would like to see people like Paul Singer die in prison, who made the lives of millions of people miserable, but I guess it's all legal what he did...

Madoff had no problem defrauding charities and pension funds. Hardly Robin Hood.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#13
post #8

The scapegoat. The only one who ripped off the rich instead of the poor. I would like to see people like Paul Singer die in prison, who made the lives of millions of people miserable, but I guess it's all legal what he did...

If you're talking about this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Singer_(businessman) I don't get any clear understanding of why someone would wish to see him die in prison.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#14
post #10

> clients entrusted him with more than $19 billion in principal > Irving Picard, the trustee appointed to unwind the accounts, had recovered more than $14.3 billion Wait WHAT?? That's only a 25% loss. Not the 100% loss I assumed. Does anyone know more?

principal -- they probably thought their accounts were worth considerably more due to accumulated returns.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#15
post #5

Hopefully he serves as an example to other Ponzi schemers in Wall Street. It's rare in the US white collar guys like this die in prison.

Putting one of them in prison isn't threatening when we let hundreds of others walk around free.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#17
post #10

> clients entrusted him with more than $19 billion in principal > Irving Picard, the trustee appointed to unwind the accounts, had recovered more than $14.3 billion Wait WHAT?? That's only a 25% loss. Not the 100% loss I assumed. Does anyone know more?

principal -- they probably thought their accounts were worth considerably more due to accumulated returns.

Matt Levine recently observed, when talking about another Ponzi scheme, that it would be nice if newspapers would quote the net and not just the gross.

Though that wouldn't tell the whole story, either. You would have the earnings of people who managed to get out of the scheme before it collapsed offsetting the losses of those who didn't. You're also not taking into account the opportunity cost of having that money in the Ponzi scheme instead of, say, VTSMX.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#19
BM is a special kind of stuck on stupid. In addition, his sons Mark and Andrew:

* Mark killed himself in December 2010 on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest.

* Andrew died in 2014 from cancer.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#20
post #10

> clients entrusted him with more than $19 billion in principal > Irving Picard, the trustee appointed to unwind the accounts, had recovered more than $14.3 billion Wait WHAT?? That's only a 25% loss. Not the 100% loss I assumed. Does anyone know more?

That's not too surprising. Matt Levine wrote about the recent 1inMM ponzi scheme recently[1] and the scammer's "take" was only 10%. It makes sense if you think about it. For a ponzi scheme to work you need to constantly circulate cash (from new investors to old investors), so it's hard for you to take a lot without collapsing the whole scheme.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-08/archeg...

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