While Clients Lost Their Shirts And Didn’t
Know It
December 19. 2008
The story of Bernard Madoff is another prime example of why
America is currently steeped in the worst financial crisis since
the Great Depression, that shows no signs of abating.
Madoff, an investment broker, was arrested and charged this month with perpetrating
the greatest fraud in Wall Street history. Due to Madoff being
famous and well connected, Congress, the DOJ, FBI, SEC, FTC and
White House looked the other way, as complaints came in for
years
regarding his questionable conduct. It took his own sons to blow
the whistle on him.
$50 billion dollars in investments Madoff managed is
gone, many families have lost their life savings and pensions
and will lose their homes in the coming months.
Madoff smirking two days ago
Foreign banks that escaped damage in this year’s U.S.
mortgage crisis, were burned in the Madoff scandal, losing
billions of dollars, which should not have happened.
The government failed the American people, U.S. charities and
foreign banks
that invested with Madoff, placing their money and trust in Wall Street.
What the government will recover in the case by way of fines
and restitution does not even
begin to cover the substantial losses that have occurred. People are going
to get back cents on the dollar for what they’ve lost.
This story is reminiscent of Enron, that was allowed to
continue in business, because of their ties to George W. Bush,
whilst ripping off the America people. Billions of dollars were
lost in that case as well.
All these scandals have destroyed corporate America’s name in
the world. When is the U.S. government going to wake up and stop
allowing cronyism to take precedence over justice, integrity,
fairness and decency?
The sad part is, there are more Bernard Madoffs out there. A hand full of people in corporate America, that don’t even
constitute 1% of the U.S. population, are engaging in unethical,
questionable, unlawful acts, then corrupting members of
government in the judicial system and regulatory agencies, to
get away with it.
It does not inspire consumer confidence from the nation or
the world, when everyone sees firsthand how easy it is to lose
everything one has in America, via being defrauded as an
innocent bystander or doing business with individuals the
government allows to get away with murder, as the expression
goes, in engaging in fraud and theft.
Other leading nations in the world are already pulling away
their core investments from America, because of the corruption,
injustice, cover-ups and lack of transparency they witnessed in
2008.
But if the powers that be in the U.S. government think losing
trillions in foreign investments, due to the world’s distrust of
corporate America and the U.S. judicial system is a good thing,
they can continue to not clean it up and allow certain entities
to run wild with acts of thievery and villainy and watch the
country’s GNP plummet to unprecedented lows.
People don’t want to see this kind of corruption coming out
of the judicial system, government and corporate America. It
sends an awful, confounding message that is very disappointing.
STORY SOURCE
Madoff shocks markets
JUST when you thought you have seen
it all, the US corporate cop today arrested 70-year-old Wall
Street legend Bernie Madoff for alleged securities fraud
involving a ponzi scheme, which is estimated to have lost
investors as much as $US50 billion.
So we have had the sub-prime
crisis, the world’s banking system frozen refusing to deal with
each other, credit markets closed, the Governor of Illinois
attempting to make a few bob on selling Barrack Obama’s Senate
seat and now arguably the biggest Wall Street fraud on record. It’s extraordinary how calamity
breeds calamity.
SEC Failed to Act on ‘Credible,
Specific’ Madoff Tips, Cox Says
Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox said
the agency failed to act for almost a decade on “credible and
specific allegations” of wrongdoing by Bernard Madoff, who
authorities say bilked investors of as much as $50 billion.
Allegations dating back until at
least 1999 “were repeatedly brought to the attention of SEC
staff, but were never recommended to the commission for action,”
Cox, 56, said in a statement yesterday. He announced an internal
probe to review the “deeply troubling” revelations.
“He’s revolted by what he found
out, but it’s also in his interest to be revolted,” said James
Cox, a securities law professor at Duke University in Durham,
North Carolina who isn’t related to the SEC chairman. “He’s
taken a lot of heat over SEC enforcement.”
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. House
of Representatives panel plans to convene an inquiry in January
into the failure of regulators to unearth an alleged $50 billion
securities fraud by financier Bernard Madoff, a key lawmaker
said on Wednesday.
Eliot Spitzer, who as New York
attorney general was known as the “Sheriff of Wall Street” for
his crusade against investment fraud, has acknowledged that his
family was swindled by the man accused of running what could be
the largest Ponzi scheme in history.
U.S. Judge Freezes Madoff Assets,
Appoints Receiver, SEC Says
Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- A federal
judge in New York froze the assets of New York investment
adviser Bernard L. Madoff and his firm a day after the
70-year-old was arrested in a potential $50 billion fraud,
regulators said.
U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton
in Manhattan today granted a government request to give
“emergency relief” to investors by freezing Madoff’s assets and
appointing a receiver, the U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission said on its Web site.
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