According to the Times Online, “Some of America’s wealthiest socialites were facing ruin last night after the arrest of a Wall Street big hitter accused of the largest investor swindle perpetrated by one man.
“Shock and panic spread through the country clubs of Palm Beach and Long Island after Bernard Madoff, a trading powerbroker for more than four decades, allegedly confessed to a fraud that will cost his wealthy investors at least $50 billion – perhaps the largest swindle in Wall Street history.
“Mr. Madoff, 70, a former Nasdaq stock chairman, was apparently turned in by his two sons and arrested on Thursday morning at his Manhattan apartment by the FBI. Andrew Calamari, a senior enforcement official at the US Securities and Exchange Commission, described the scheme as “a stunning fraud that appears to be of epic proportions”.
“The FBI’s criminal complaint states that when two federal agents arrived at Mr Madoff’s apartment, he told them: “There is no innocent explanation.” The agents say that he told them “he paid investors with money that wasn’t there”, that he was “broke” and that he expected to go to jail.”
Captain Capitalism put it well;
Wall Street = Morons
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2008/12/wall-street-morons.html
“Shock and panic spread through the country clubs of Palm Beach and Long Island after Bernard Madoff, a trading powerbroker for more than four decades, allegedly confessed to a fraud that will cost his wealthy investors at least $50 billion – perhaps the largest swindle in Wall Street history.
“Mr. Madoff, 70, a former Nasdaq stock chairman, was apparently turned in by his two sons and arrested on Thursday morning at his Manhattan apartment by the FBI. Andrew Calamari, a senior enforcement official at the US Securities and Exchange Commission, described the scheme as “a stunning fraud that appears to be of epic proportions”.
“The FBI’s criminal complaint states that when two federal agents arrived at Mr Madoff’s apartment, he told them: “There is no innocent explanation.” The agents say that he told them “he paid investors with money that wasn’t there”, that he was “broke” and that he expected to go to jail.”
Captain Capitalism put it well;
Wall Street = Morons
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2008/12/wall-street-morons.html
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I don't care if they went to Harvard or Yale or the Ivy League.I don't care if they work at Goldman Sachs.In the end, these people are not "intelligent" or "smarter" or "better."They're absolutely inferior people compared to the rest of the US and only got by on connections.And the Wisconsin hick fly over kid selling lemonade at his stand making a profit is a better businessMAN than any one of these schmucks will ever be.
Yet ANOTHER way to see that development is as a form of natural selection.
Ever wonder how the spoiled wealthy scions of families who hadn’t really “earned” in generations kept accruing wealth despite having little involvement and even less knowledge about finance or even their own family finances?
People like Bernie Madoff are part of the reason.
Wealth is never erased, it is merely transferred and that’s what we are witnessing now, a major transfer of wealth from one segment of society to another.
Olde Wall Street never recovered from the bloodletting of 1929 and beyond. Old monied families were supplanted by the likes of the Sach’s and the Kennedy’s and J P Morgan and other old line robber barons got on board with the likes of Bernard Baruch in engineering a “new economy” and a “new social order.”
Now a new investor class is supplanting what has become the old one.
I’d like to say that the new one could hardly be any worse than the old one, but only time will tell.
Right now, a lot of families that made their fortunes in the early parts of the 20th Century are in for a dramatic fall and a new breed of smart young investors are supplanting them.
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