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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

I was always fascinated by how violently people felt toward Madoff. Madoff reminds me of a character in a Woody Allen movie. Martin Landau in Crimes and Misdemeanors.

In Dosteovsky, the perpetrator feels real guilt, confesses, and finds salvation in God. In Woody Allen, the perpetrator gets over his guilt and lives happily ever after, avoiding punishment. In Madoff's case, the perpetrator dies in prison and his family is destroyed.

Of the three, Madoff killed no one. In some sense I think he was a scapegoat for the 2008 financial crisis. That's not to say that he was innocent or that his crimes were insignificant. Only that, due to the timing, he became a convenient target for the public's understandable outrage over the financial crisis.

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Of the three, Madoff killed no one.

Also of the three, Madoff was a real person, not a fictional character, which is probably where the comparisons start to fall apart.

I think a lot of it is simply there's a lot of frustration that crimes like this go on every day. Many people see the top levels of finance as all being tainted by fraud, stealing from ordinary workers, and this acts as confirmation for that.

Bernie's fraud imploding did motivate several suicides. Not exactly killing by his own hand, but he does bear some responsibility. We also shouldn't ignore he cravenly focused on charities as their legal requirements would give his ponzi scheme the longest runway. He also leveraged his reputation in the ultra wealthy NE Jewish community to find victims. So independent of the common outrage, I can see how a lot of people would see this as a particularly ugly betrayal.

I think the general understanding is that the visceral animosity has to do with the nature of the betrayal. His fund was shopped around largely to other wealthy people in his community; they thought they were making money hand-over-fist (particularly for all of the charities and whatnot they could have just been funding directly), with an "in" that people outside couldn't access. Finding out that Madoff had actually lost all of their money wasn't just a hit to their pocketbooks: it struck at the solidarity of their community, at their sense of self and goodness, at their egos. In short, it stripped them of everything that being part of the fund was supposed to magnify. It's not just embarrassing, it's devastating; all of your psychic and material fallbacks have been wiped in one fell swoop. When something like that happens, you don't want to admit that you were taken for a fool; you need a scapegoat, and you need him to be a demon.

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