Bernard Madoff

Madoff enabler being treated unfairly

razib — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:37:28 +0000

Madoff enabler being treated unfairly

Lawyers for Broker in Madoff Case Call U.S. Suits Unfair:

"What the commission has done here to Robert Jaffe is simply unfair," the defense motion argued. "The agency has called him a cheat, a knowing participant in the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Yet, it has failed to back up these charges with factual allegation

I think using broad-brush terms like "unfair" which aren't precise & legal is probably not a good move. Life isn't fair, and many people screwed by Bernie Madoff will never be made whole. That's not fair, but that's reality.

razib Mon, 08/24/2009 - 19:37

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Bernard Madoff

The reason they are using the legally meaningless term "unfair" is that they have no legally meaningful term to hang their hat on.

Jaffee must go to prison. He was Madoff's #1 shill.

Bernie Madoff was a cheater in more ways than one

razib — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:50:43 +0000

Bernie Madoff was a cheater in more ways than one

Woman Tells of Affair With Madoff in New Book:

Hadassah, the Jewish volunteer organization, knew it had invested $40 million with Bernard L. Madoff by the late 1990s. It also knew it had taken more than $130 million from its Madoff accounts and still had millions on the books when the vast Ponzi scheme was revealed in December.

What the charity says it did not know, however, was that Sheryl Weinstein, its chief financial officer when it made those investments, was having an affair with Mr. Madoff.

Ms. Weinstein, who has been married for 37 years, discloses that relationship in "Madoff's Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me," a memoir scheduled for publication by St. Martin's Press at the end of August, a spokesman for the publisher confirmed.

H/T Sigma

razib Thu, 08/13/2009 - 21:50

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Bernard Madoff

Bernie Madoff

'... She and her husband were forced to sell their home âbecause four years ago we refinanced our mortgage and gave the excess cash to Bernie Madoff,â she continued.'

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

McCulloch accuses Steig et al. of appropriating his âfindingâ that Steig et al. did not account for autocorrelation when calculating the significance of trends. While the published version of the paper didnât include such a correction, it is obvious that the authors were aware of the need to do so, since in the text of the paper it is stated that this correction was made. The corrected calculations were done using well-known methods, the details of which are available in myriad statistics textbooks and journal articles. There can therefore be no claim on Dr. McCullochâs part of any originality either for the idea of making such a correction, nor for the methods for doing so, all of which were discussed in the original paper. Had Dr. McCulloch been the first person to make Steig et al. aware of the error in the paper, or had he written directly to Nature at any time prior to the submission of the Corrigendum, it would have been appropriate to acknowledge him and the authors would have been happy to do so. Lest there be any confusion about this, we note that, as discussed in the Corrigendum, the error has no impact on the main conclusions in the paper.

Madoff and that woman deserved each other.

Bernie Madoff on Frontline

razib — Tue, 12 May 2009 22:35:15 +0000

Bernie Madoff on Frontline

You can watch the new Frontline documentary on Bernie's fraud online. If you're a Madoff-junkie, like I am, absolutely nothing new in terms of substance. But, it is really striking how much Fairfield Greenwich was run by total bullshit artists.

razib Tue, 05/12/2009 - 18:35

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Bernard Madoff

Bernie Madoff

Bernie, the man & the madness

razib — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 04:19:03 +0000

Bernie, the man & the madness

Fortune has a massive profile of Bernie Madoff's life, career and scam. Some new material too.

razib Sun, 04/26/2009 - 00:19

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Funny how everyone calls this ghastly, evil man "Bernie", like he's your sly, kidding but basically harmless uncle.

Why?

old jewish guys from queens are bernie, not bernard :-)

(rolls eyes) This is what you call the opposite of "can't catch a break."

Co-conspirators in the Madoff Saga

razib — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:47:47 +0000

Co-conspirators in the Madoff Saga

The Next Targets in the Madoff Case:

One source said that eventually, many members of Madoff's family will either be indicted by the US attorney's office for the Southern District of New York or cop a plea. "You have to look at the fact that Peter and [his daughter] Shana were compliance officers; they were supposed to look at all the statements to see if they were right," the source said. "Either they asked no questions, turned a blind eye, or they could not help but see the falsified trade tickets of blue-chip companies sent to clients."

razib Tue, 03/10/2009 - 19:47

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Related article from Scientific American, Art of the Con, says:

the University of Colorado at Boulder psychiatry professor Stephen Greenspan in his new book The Annals of Gullibility (Praeger, 2008), which, with supreme irony, he wrote before he lost more than half his retirement investments in Madoff's company! "The basic mechanism explaining the success of Ponzi schemes is the tendency of humans to model their actions, especially when dealing with matters they don't fully understand, on the behavior of other humans," Greenspan notes.
The effect is particularly powerful within an ethnic or religious community