Looks to me he is a honestly sad man.
only because he got caught.
Bernard Madoff’s Courtroom Confession About His Ponzi Scheme
11–20 of 24 posts
Re: Bernard Madoff’s Courtroom Confession About His Ponzi Scheme
#12I 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.
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.
Re: Bernard Madoff’s Courtroom Confession About His Ponzi Scheme
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
That's a really ignorant statement. His foundation has been doing unprecedented work in treating diseases and education. They not only donate a lot of money, but oversee it's spending and design programs out of their pocket. None of it is just simply a tax write-off.
Re: Bernard Madoff’s Courtroom Confession About His Ponzi Scheme
#14I 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.
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.
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.
Re: Bernard Madoff’s Courtroom Confession About His Ponzi Scheme
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Gates spends about 0% of his fortune for his personal pleasure. He's not on the beach surrounded by bikini babes. He works hard on his current mission, and he deserves our respect.
His wealth is invested either in growing businesses (a good thing) or through his foundation to improve the world (a very good thing.) It's not clear that he could grow the foundation much faster than he has -- they're trying to do something novel and you can't just grow that from nothing overnight.
Re: Bernard Madoff’s Courtroom Confession About His Ponzi Scheme
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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?
Re: Bernard Madoff’s Courtroom Confession About His Ponzi Scheme
#17Those who are very greedy should read that.
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…
Don't know about Gates, but Buffet still lives in a small 2 bedroom apartment. Take your words at someone else - MTV Cribs, etc.
Re: Bernard Madoff’s Courtroom Confession About His Ponzi Scheme
#18What 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?
Re: Bernard Madoff’s Courtroom Confession About His Ponzi Scheme
#19Whatever 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.
Re: Bernard Madoff’s Courtroom Confession About His Ponzi Scheme
#20It 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.…
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 ?