How the Trump story will end

[milestogo]

I've been watching the Richard Dreyfus version of the Bernie Madoff story. Madoff bilked investors out of billions through a Ponzi scheme. He was a con artist who swam with the big fish and didn't get caught until the SEC investigated him. At that point he had been cheating people for years, but nobody was watching.

I can't help but think of Trump while watching the story of this con artist. Madoff was a narcisisst - a habitual liar and a manipulator.

He ended up destroying his family and is now serving a 150 year prison sentence. This is how his story ends, and this is how Trump's story will end when all his lying finally catches up with him. And it will.

[grantcart]

1. Except that Bernie Madoff has self awareness and Trump is priming the pump.

[milestogo]

2. So Trump's fall will be even worse and he still won't have a clue what happened.

[Warpy]

3. Madoff was delivered to the SEC with a big ribbon on him for several years

running before anybody bothered to do anything about him. That's the real scandal, not the Ponzi scheme he was running.

Hell, if he was only cheating poor people, they'd never have been interested. His mistake was that he cheated the rich.

[delisen]

4. Interesting parallel.

They are able to operate in plain sight.

Madoff might have been able to continue his Ponzi scheme until he died; he got caught because of the massive financial crash and too many clients suddenly, at the same time, wanted their money back.

[milestogo]

5. There was a financial analyst trying to expose him for 10 years.

In 1999, financial analyst Harry Markopolos had informed the SEC that he believed it was legally and mathematically impossible to achieve the gains Madoff claimed to deliver. According to Markopolos, he knew within five minutes that Madoff's numbers did not add up, and it took him four hours of failed attempts to replicate them to conclude that Madoff was a fraud.[69] He was ignored by the SEC's Boston office in 2000 and 2001, as well as by Meaghan Cheung at the SEC's New York office in 2005 and 2007 when he presented further evidence. He has since co-authored a book with Gaytri Kachroo (the leader of his legal team) titled No One Would Listen. The book details the frustrating efforts he and his legal team made over a ten-year period to alert the government, the industry, and the press about Madoff's fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff

[delisen]

7. Thanks, I want to read that book.

[alittlelark]

6. From your lips to the goddesses ears....

[localroger]

8. As others said, the SEC didn't take Madoff down, what took him down was...

...his Ponzi scheme finally collapsed and he couldn't find enough new investors to pay his old investors. Until that happened nobody would believe the people who were onto him, and once it happened it was waaaaaaay too late.