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Bernie Madoff has died

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Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#181

Post by etripe »

ryandrake wrote: post #141
cletus wrote: post #30

Here's the one lesson I really want us to all learn from this: the only thing the rich fear is prison because prison robs them of time. Fines are just the cost of doing business. There are many other scandals: the whole subprime disaster, pollution from plants and the like where no one went to prison and people really should've.

Corporations (which are usually the payer of fines for bad behavior) don't fear prison because they can't be physically imprisoned. You can't put Exxon in jail. And, lawmakers deliberately make it so damn hard to pierce the corporate liability veil and hold shareholders or directors personally liable for the corporation's actions. So, we need to both move more towards prison and start digging in to which actual peopl…

> You can't put Exxon in jail.

If a corporation is a legal person with inalienable rights (as the SCOTUS seems to have decided on), but is intangible and immortal at the same time, what can you do? Any of the below:

* freezing assets (=~ reclamation)

* seizing accounts (=~ civil forfeiture)

* suspend a business license (=~ locking them up)

* introduce a revenue cap (=~ prison labour)

* remove lobbyists (=~ losing voting rights)

* dissolve or nationalise the company (=~ death penalty)

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#182

Post by hctaw »

shawnz wrote: post #174
saalweachter wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here, let me google that for you: https://www.google.com/search?q=ponzi+scheme+definition Pon·zi scheme /ˈpänzē ˌskēm/ noun a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors.

There is no nonexistent enterprise in this case. Nobody is claiming that the returns of cryptocurrency speculators are coming from a business venture.

the nonexistent enterprise is the use of bitcoin as a medium of exchange

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#183

Post by askesisdev »

lordnacho wrote: post #159
macjohnmcc wrote: post #77

I learned a few years ago that I actually worked closely with one of the two programmers who worked with Madoff and was part of the "Madoff Five" the year before he started with Madoff. I feel the judge went too easy on the programmers involved as there is no way they did not understand what they were helping to orchestrate. I also worked closely with another programmer a couple of years later who wound up being a dr…

What were they coding? Sounded to me like nothing at all was going on inside.

They built software to create a fake history of the trading and also imitated certain software from other companies and regulators so the customer could check the trades were real. There is a decent book on Madoff called 'Wizard of Lies'

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#184

Post by hindsightbias »

nemacol wrote: post #59
cletus wrote: post #30

Here's the one lesson I really want us to all learn from this: the only thing the rich fear is prison because prison robs them of time. Fines are just the cost of doing business. There are many other scandals: the whole subprime disaster, pollution from plants and the like where no one went to prison and people really should've.

Do you think that a system of public service / community service requirements instead of fines would be better for common offenses? Without any real research I have often thought that instead of fines for parking violations, noise complaints, (other misdemeanors) etc - having someone spend time instead of money would make those sorts of punishments more equitable. There are issues - child care if a parent has to spen…

Have a friend who got a driving related offense in a Bay Area county. He asked to go to jail for two or three weeks as he had a good job and income and could make it work with his boss. It was denied and he had to do weekend community service for 8 months.

As a traveling consultant, this was a real wrench into his job and for his employer. He'd have to travel back every Thursday because he could not afford a Friday flight cancellation and missing service. Now, this court and county insists they structure it this way so to have the least impact on people. But he would arrive and watch all his crime peers arrive by taxi, foot or bike (bus service to that area on Saturday morning was a no-op).

The vast majority of his peers were not people who could afford $20 each-way taxi or uber trips and worked jobs on weekends. They lost their jobs because their licenses were suspended. He suspected many of them gave up trying to comply and parked 1/2 mile away, driving their cars with with suspended licenses.

Community service is basically a racket and not necessarily a better work/life deal than prison.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#185

Post by saalweachter »

minwcnt5 wrote: post #157
saalweachter wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is certainly zero-sum speculation within the stock market, dwarfing that in Bitcoin, sure, but the S&P 500 also pays out half a trillion dollars in dividends a year, and buys back a similar amount of stock from the profits of the actual businesses being invested in through the stock market. A trillion dollars a year funneling from business profits to investors is the difference between the S&P 500 and Bitcoin.

Gold might be a better example then.

Eh, gold is probably more analogous to houses.

The current price is largely a product of the speculation in the market, but at the same time ... a lot of people buy houses just because they want to live in them. So you have people buying houses at two, three times the price they'd be paying without the pure real estate investors speculating up the price, but at the same time, they're just buying them because they want a house and will pay the absurd price.

Likewise, there's a huge amount of speculation in the gold market, and that's probably what defines the price of gold, but at the same time, something like 50% of newly-mined gold goes to make jewelry, and most people buy it because they want it, even though [or because] it is over-priced, and they aren't buying it as an investment, just a pretty thing to have.

That doesn't mean that gold or houses are good investments, or that the markets aren't going to crash to a tenth of their current valuations next month or ten years from now, but it does mean there is a second component to the market -- you have speculators interacting with consumers, and the speculators can extract money from consumers who will buy the underlying good even at a bad price.

(Oddly, I'd say house buyers are more-expecting to get the money they invested back at some time in the future, compared to gold jewelry buyers.)

[But what do I know, I'm just a jerk on the internet saying things.]

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#186

Post by mannykannot »

john_moscow wrote: post #167
ryandrake wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations (which are usually the payer of fines for bad behavior) don't fear prison because they can't be physically imprisoned. You can't put Exxon in jail. And, lawmakers deliberately make it so damn hard to pierce the corporate liability veil and hold shareholders or directors personally liable for the corporation's actions. So, we need to both move more towards prison and start digging in to which actual peopl…

>Joe Bigshot, former SVP at BigCo, was sentenced to 5 years in jail, and had to sell two of his nine houses to pay the $20M fine" is much better. Well, they sort of do that in Russia. So the CEO/founder of almost any sketchy company is a homeless person that signed the paperwork in exchange for some free vodka. Didn't particularly solve the problem. Corporate fines just need to be sufficient to make such "business" u…

The second paragraph of the post you are replying to seems to anticipate this response:

"So, we need to both move more towards prison and start digging in to which actual people inside bad corporations were responsible for deciding to do wrongdoing."

In the post-Enron world, however, executives have learned how to use incentives to motivate their minions to break the law without being explicitly told to do so. On the one hand, this makes it difficult to prosecute those who bear most responsiblity; on the other hand, more effective prosecution might curtail the supply of minions who can be motivated to be compliantly criminal.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#187

Post by newsclues »

ryandrake wrote: post #141
cletus wrote: post #30

Here's the one lesson I really want us to all learn from this: the only thing the rich fear is prison because prison robs them of time. Fines are just the cost of doing business. There are many other scandals: the whole subprime disaster, pollution from plants and the like where no one went to prison and people really should've.

Corporations (which are usually the payer of fines for bad behavior) don't fear prison because they can't be physically imprisoned. You can't put Exxon in jail. And, lawmakers deliberately make it so damn hard to pierce the corporate liability veil and hold shareholders or directors personally liable for the corporation's actions. So, we need to both move more towards prison and start digging in to which actual peopl…

Normalization imprisonment of boards of directors and executive officers of companies that break the law.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#188

Post by _wqdq »

data_acquired wrote: post #27
phpsuks wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To quote another Bernie, there's a fair bit of socialism for the rich in the US through bailouts when big corporations lose too much money/are too big to fail.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, as that's as true of a statement as almost anything. This weird, hypermasculine obsession with capitalism amongst this forum (and tech community at large) just perpetuates injustices.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#189

Post by backtoyoujim »

cletus wrote: post #30

Here's the one lesson I really want us to all learn from this: the only thing the rich fear is prison because prison robs them of time. Fines are just the cost of doing business. There are many other scandals: the whole subprime disaster, pollution from plants and the like where no one went to prison and people really should've.

I disagree.

--

“Bernie really was a successful businessman with quite original insights into the market, and he’s continued applying his business instincts in prison,” Fishman said. “At one point, he cornered the hot chocolate market. He bought up every package of Swiss Miss from the commissary and sold it for a profit in the prison yard. He monopolized hot chocolate! He made it so that, if you wanted any, you had to go through Bernie.”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-series-casts-bernie-ma...

--

Bernie wasn't trapped with them. They were trapped with Bernie.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#190

Post by seneca »

etripe wrote: post #181
ryandrake wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations (which are usually the payer of fines for bad behavior) don't fear prison because they can't be physically imprisoned. You can't put Exxon in jail. And, lawmakers deliberately make it so damn hard to pierce the corporate liability veil and hold shareholders or directors personally liable for the corporation's actions. So, we need to both move more towards prison and start digging in to which actual peopl…

> You can't put Exxon in jail. If a corporation is a legal person with inalienable rights (as the SCOTUS seems to have decided on), but is intangible and immortal at the same time, what can you do? Any of the below: * freezing assets (=~ reclamation) * seizing accounts (=~ civil forfeiture) * suspend a business license (=~ locking them up) * introduce a revenue cap (=~ prison labour) * remove lobbyists (=~ losing vot…

> If a corporation is a legal person with inalienable rights (as the SCOTUS seems to have decided on)

Please stop repeating this nonsense. Corporate Personhood is a legal idea, and does not mean a "corporation is a legal person". Without corporate personhood, you wouldn't be able to sue a company for wrongdoing if the guilty employee quit, or even enforce basic contracts.

There are serious problems with corporations not being held liable, but the situation would be worse without Corporate Personhood, not better.

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