Bernard Madoff’s Courtroom Confession About His Ponzi Scheme
bloomberg.com
This is clearly a reason greed is not that good.
bloomberg.com
And it's ludicrous to compare a guy who steals from a charity for Holocaust survivors to leading business founders. Madoff is as completely venal as anyone who has ever been convicted of a business crime anywhere.
Who knows, he may have been this close to curing cancer before investigators came in...
Does anybody know how much money he has with him, I mean, will anybody who invested with him get anything at all back ?! I mean where did all the 50 billion go ?
Just producing the paperwork that was sent to each investor on a monthly basis would be more than a full time job. Add to that the lengthy SEC filings, etc.
And he was not working full time - he spent a lot of time schmoozing either in NYC or Palm Beach.
I'm sure you're right, though: a lot of people must have been in on it, and he's covering for them.
He had a parallel, successful and legit investment business, so it's not like he didn't know how to do it. He could have prolonged the scheme (and made it harder to detect) by doing real trades and just inflating the rate of return.
Was he just trying to get caught all these years?
Dishonest people with an insatiable need to be loved and accepted should read this. Unfortunately, they're generally told that their instincts are virtuous enough to compensate for the harm they cause, just as greedy people are told that they are so evil it negates the wealth they create.
The guy charged zero fees on his money management business. He could have charged 2 and 20, and had an income of $1-$2 billion by this point.
If you look at how he spent the money he did have, it wasn't on whores and blow. He gave money away to charities, he got onto boards -- he made himself part of the establishment, because he wanted people to love him. If he'd stayed a market-maker and never given money away, people wouldn't have looked up to him for decades, but they wouldn't loathe him now, either. He'd just be another successful guy who created a lot of wealth and didn't particularly need approval.
His wealth is invested either in growing businesses (a good thing) or through his foundation to improve the world (a very good thing.) It's not clear that he could grow the foundation much faster than he has -- they're trying to do something novel and you can't just grow that from nothing overnight.
Gates has the wisdom and guts to tackle such unsexy causes as malaria in the third world. Because Bill Gates exists, there is substantially less suffering in the world. That's not something you can say about many individuals with any confidence.
We could take away his money and spread it among the masses, but I guarantee you those masses would not use his money in nearly as useful ways. We could take away his money and spend it through the government, but the government already has much larger aid programs that do much less good.
I understand criticizing Gates for his business practices. But attacking him for how he chooses to fight malaria - it boggles my mind.
Do you have any EVIDENCE that Gates is being anything less than sincere in his charitable projects?
Hehe ... I don't think the windows vista users will agree with you !! [:D] ( sorry ! I couldn't resist it )
You are mistaken.
> and are personally offended by income inequality
No, just excessive income inequality. There's something wrong with a system that allows one individual to amass more wealth than the bottom 40% of the population combined. That's a broken system that's far too tilted to favor the individual over the society as a whole. I don't have anything against rich people, I have something against the system that allows it to such excess.
Stating my opinion is not attacking, all I said was they could give more, which is a fact. The foundation is required to give 5% a year to avoid most taxes, which seems to be all they give, investing the other 95% to grow the endowment without taking into consideration of the harm that 95% could be bringing to the world...
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx0...
That strikes me as them being more worried about making money than actually helping people.
> but I guarantee you those masses would not use his money in nearly as useful ways
No you can't, you can only guess.
> But attacking him for how he chooses to fight malaria - it boggles my mind.
You have a strange definition of attacking. I didn't attack them, and I'm not dissing the good they do but it's being blind to not see that they don't do as much as they can, they do as much as the law requires them too. That says something whether you want to see it or not.
Your honor, for years I sold investment 'insurance' policies that I knew would have no hope of paying off in exactly that situation where they would have been most valuable, a general deleveraging and asset price bust. Rather than creating suitable reserves and hedges with collected premiums, I paid myself and my employees richly. By systematically underpricing the 'guarantees' I was offering, I engaged in unfair competition, ensuring my firm a disproportionate amount of the global business in our markets.
I had full knowledge that in the case of a serious business reversal, the implicit 'systemic' guarantees by US federal institutions would cover our obligations. Thus, for years before the eventuality of tangible federal payment -- an eventuality my outsized and reckless business practices made certain except in the precise timing -- I was enriching myself by fraudulent misappropriation of federal funds.