headline:::frontline
“The management of market risk and credit risk has become increasingly sophisticated. … Banking organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to measure and manage risks.”//Ben Bernanke//The Quiet Coup
“We checked the people who have business with him, and they were among the best minds on Wall Street, the geniuses of finance,” Mr Wiesel said. “I am not a genius of finance. I teach philosophy and literature – and so it happened.”//independent
“Nobody knew anything about anything.”//Andrés Piedrahita//wsj
“Mr. Markopolos says his experience with most S.E.C. officials “proved to be a systemic disappointment, and lead me to conclude that the S.E.C. securities lawyers, if only through their investigative ineptitude and financial illiteracy, colluded to maintain large frauds such as the one to which Madoff later confessed.””//NYT/DealBook
“For the amount of money and number of accounts, it’s practically impossible that he was doing this alone. What’s mind-boggling is the amount of assets and the amount of time he was doing it.”/Arpad Busson/telegraph
“As long as more cash was coming in than was being withdrawn, Mr. Madoff used money from new investors to cover withdrawals by other investors.When the cash to cover withdrawal demands ran out, he confessed to his sons that his money management operation was a fraud and was arrested.”//NYT
Vanity Fair
“all just one big lie” and “basically a giant Ponzi scheme” which had been insolvent for years.//independent
“He (Stanley Chais, a prominent Los Angeles philanthropist., one of the fund feeders) led us to believe he was the genius and his people were the geniuses behind all this. When really all he did was collect the money and move it on to someone else. And he was getting a 25 percent cut for this.””//Jewish Journal
“‘He was considered to be a caring, sharing guy,’ she said. ‘I thought he was lovely Uncle Bernie. He was a wonderful guy to work for.”//dailymail
“If you rip off a bank and insurance company, an institution, that’s an acceptable crime. Bernie hurt people. “//Larry Levine//Jewish Journal
“Madoff broke our economy,” she said. “He was behind its entire collapse, he was the front and backbone of the largest heist in history and his jail cell will become his coffin…//Ivy Supersonic//DealBook
“Well, you know what happens is, it starts out with you taking a little bit, maybe a few hundred, a few thousand. You get comfortable with that, and before you know it, it snowballs into something big.”//Bernie Madoff//Vanity Fair
“This truly is, for lack of a better term, the Adolf Hitler of white-collar crime.”//Douglas A. Berman//NYT
“Like Traudl Junge, Squillari insisted that in all that time she had had no idea what lay beneath her boss’s affable, if frequently peculiar, façade, or what transpired on the 17th floor of the Lipstick Building—two floors below her office—where $65 billion in investors’ funds disappeared.”//VF
“Smart investors didn’t care. They didn’t care as long as Madoff kept posting solid numbers with low volatility.”//The Daily Beast
“At Mr. Madoff’s sentencing hearing on Monday, federal prosecutors said that net cash losses in accounts opened since 1996 would total at least $13 billion. At the time of Mr. Madoff’s arrest in December, his customers believed they had almost $65 billion invested in their Madoff accounts. In reality, almost all of the cash they had invested was paid out to other investors as dividends or withdrawals.”//NYT
“‘‘The investors who took distributions for sometimes decades took a heck of a lot more out of this than they put in,’’ he(Markopolos, the now-famous financial investigator who tried unsuccessfully for 10 years to alert the Securities and Exchange Commission to Madoff’s fraud) said.”//Boston Globe
“Are there any financial supermen left, promising something that sounds too good to be true?”//the impressionist
“”He was like a rock star,” said one person who attended a competition with Madoff.”//CNBC
“It’s a little bit like seeing the devil.”//odt
“Thank God for Bernie!” said a third.//VF
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“Operate in a world where your business model depends on honesty, full disclosure, and the realistic portrayal of your product and company on their own merits, rather than one where the incidental glimpse behind the scenes is traumatizing to the corporation as a whole.”//Adrian Lamo//Dr.Dobbs
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"You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals."// The Conscience of a Hacker ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
“You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.”
-Mahatma Gandhi//Richard Stallman
Filed under: disciples of the watch | Tagged: greed, incredibility, madoff | 1 Comment »
