Dear Charlie,
This is just fascinating!
A very interesting perspective on regulation of money/assets...
"How to catch a Madoff?
I’ve been saying over the last few days (e.g.), the Madoff case of a regulated investment firm stealing $50 billion from under the regulators’ noses should tell us that it’s a mistake to rely too heavily on regulation.
But this may be putting a little too much on the defrauded investors themselves. Ron Cass notes in today’s WSJ that Madoff played on the tight-knit Jewish community:
The sense of common heritage, of community, also makes it less seemly to ask hard questions. Pressing a fellow parishioner or club member for hard information is like demanding receipts from your aunt -- it just doesn't feel right. Hucksters know that, they play on it, and they count on our trust to make their confidence games work. The level of affinity and of trust may be especially high among Jews. The Holocaust and generations of anti-Semitic laws and practices around the world made reliance on other Jews, and care for them, a survival instinct. As a result, Jews are often an easy target both for fund-raising appeals and fraud.
Cass notes another problem:
The SEC's failure to pursue complaints about Mr. Madoff over the past decade wasn't the result of inadequate regulations but of disbelief that someone so well entrenched in the industry -- a former Nasdaq chairman and SEC adviser -- was capable of committing such a callous crime.
Or, as Bob Dylan would say (in "Sweetheart Like You"), "steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king." Though I’m not sure this would excuse the SEC, it might let the investors off the hook.
Robert Graves’ old saw that “just as there is no money in poetry, there is no poetry in money.” [We learn from the Spectator that Graves said this in a speech to the London School of Economics in 1963.]
But how can this be possible... when this famous poem says it all?
From Richard Armour: "That money talks I’ll not deny, I heard it once, It said ‘Goodbye’."
http://busmovie.typepad.com/ideoblog/2008/12/how-to-catch-a-madoff.html
A really great perspective on balance... and common sense!
This is just fascinating!
A very interesting perspective on regulation of money/assets...
"How to catch a Madoff?
I’ve been saying over the last few days (e.g.), the Madoff case of a regulated investment firm stealing $50 billion from under the regulators’ noses should tell us that it’s a mistake to rely too heavily on regulation.
But this may be putting a little too much on the defrauded investors themselves. Ron Cass notes in today’s WSJ that Madoff played on the tight-knit Jewish community:
The sense of common heritage, of community, also makes it less seemly to ask hard questions. Pressing a fellow parishioner or club member for hard information is like demanding receipts from your aunt -- it just doesn't feel right. Hucksters know that, they play on it, and they count on our trust to make their confidence games work. The level of affinity and of trust may be especially high among Jews. The Holocaust and generations of anti-Semitic laws and practices around the world made reliance on other Jews, and care for them, a survival instinct. As a result, Jews are often an easy target both for fund-raising appeals and fraud.
Cass notes another problem:
The SEC's failure to pursue complaints about Mr. Madoff over the past decade wasn't the result of inadequate regulations but of disbelief that someone so well entrenched in the industry -- a former Nasdaq chairman and SEC adviser -- was capable of committing such a callous crime.
Or, as Bob Dylan would say (in "Sweetheart Like You"), "steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king." Though I’m not sure this would excuse the SEC, it might let the investors off the hook.
Robert Graves’ old saw that “just as there is no money in poetry, there is no poetry in money.” [We learn from the Spectator that Graves said this in a speech to the London School of Economics in 1963.]
But how can this be possible... when this famous poem says it all?
From Richard Armour: "That money talks I’ll not deny, I heard it once, It said ‘Goodbye’."
http://busmovie.typepad.com/ideoblog/2008/12/how-to-catch-a-madoff.html
A really great perspective on balance... and common sense!