One Madoff is standing in for a whole class and a system.

[JackRiddler]

Anyone recall back in December how the Madoff story first started in the news reports?

Supposedly, after 35 years, he tearfully confessed his ponzi scheme to his family -- all of whom were employed as officers in the scam!

My, how they must have been shocked, shocked to learn the news!

Here's what I think is the most important thing about Madoff: he is one of the inventors of the NASDAQ as we know it today, and was chairman of the company board for many years. The history of this and other trading and investment banking institutions needs to be rewritten in the light of his criminality, and that of so many others.

That ain't no anomaly. The investment banking class is a pirate class. In good times, that's practically their credo.

Check out the various Madoff stories in my posts on this VERY LONG thread from another board:
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?p=251711

Scroll down to the section that starts with "A Small Madoff Compendium" and read especially the story by Fingleton about the WSJ failure to report about Madoff even though they had the information in 2005!

Here's the Fingleton story in original link - it's the best Madoff article I've read.
http://www.unsustainable.org/index.asp?type=article&contentID=45

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times slept while Bernie Madoff swindled

By Eamonn Fingleton



An old maxim has it that newspaper editors separate the wheat from the chaff, then print the chaff. By this standard, the editors of the Wall Street Journal have shown special deftness in their handling of the Madoff affair.

They used the occasion of whistleblower Harry Markopolos’ testimony in Washington recently to address seemingly every minuscule detail of the scam. They even published an irrelevant, if lovingly crafted, floor plan of Bernard Madoff's office in the Midtown Manhattan Lipstick building. Yet, in all their apparent desire to “flood the zone” (maybe they’re angling for a Pulitzer!), one detail was missing. Not a word of explanation was offered about the curious role played by the Journal’s own Washington-based investigative reporter John R. Wilke.

As Markopolos’ written testimony has made clear, Wilke long ago knew the score. As far back as 2005, he had been entrusted with Markopolos’ now famous dossier raising no less than 29 red flags about Madoff. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, on the strength of an afternoon’s research, a good reporter could have worked up any one of Markopolos’ points into a cracker of a front-page story. Taken as a whole, the dossier represented the biggest “career development opportunity” any journalist has been handed since Deep Throat delivered the goods on Richard Nixon to Woodward and Bernstein a generation ago.

See also the Madoff related stuff in the long thread here:
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?t=21495&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30

Above all, Madoff implicates the SEC as a completely corrupt agency. They were informed about his activities at length by Markopolos starting in the 1990s. And the WSJ, who got the Markopolos dossier in 2005.

But also his partners in the Primex Trading venture, who happened to be: Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merill Lynch. They all mysteriously didn't ever invest in his fund -- basically because they knew it was a fraud, and this was even said openly at Goldman -- but they were happy to try to set up a trading platform with him to fleece the sheep.

http://www.counterpunch.org/martens01152009.html

January 15, 2009

Primex Trading's Dark Pool Operations

Wall Street Powerhouses Invested Alongside Madoff

By PAM MARTENS

There has been much debate among Wall Street veterans as to why major European investment banks suffered serious damage from the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme while our biggest U.S. investment banks escaped unscathed.

For the past two decades, Wall Street watchers could count on four U.S. firms to land in the middle of every securities scandal. From Nasdaq price fixing to fake research to rigging the IPO markets to peddling toxic subprime assets, one could rest assured that Citigroup’s Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs would be heading the lineup. Their complete absence from the greatest Ponzi scheme in history raises the question: what did they know and when did they know it?

The answer may reside in a pentagonal structure created in 1999 to serve the interests of a Wall Street cartel.

On September 14, 1999, it was officially announced that Citigroup’s Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs had partnered with Bernard Madoff to compete head on with the New York Stock Exchange in a venture called Primex Trading.

You can be sure that Madoff's going down as the -- DESERVING -- scapegoat for a system, and his family and no doubt a big chunk of their wealth will go untouched so as to assure their silence and prevent an unravelling of financial-sector-as-scam.

(For now, anyway. There will be no hiding AIG, next few times they roll around for another 10-20-50 billion.)


Incroyable!

[JackRiddler]

1. happy bump

[LeftHander]

2. He is not....he is one part....a creation of Conservatism

deregulation and cronyism.

[JackRiddler]

3. You mean, like the Glass Steagal repeal and the Commodities Modernization acts...

signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1999 and 2000?

[BeFree]

4. Heh

Madoff is just a pimple on the butt of the body politic that has allowed him to be.

They'll pop this pimple but leave the rest of the asses a loan.(sic)