Which bank do you do business with. My bank is J. P. Morgan Chase. So I was very interested to read this account tonight in the New York Times:
Irving Picard, the bankruptcy trustee gathering evidence to use to repay the victims of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, has filed a lawsuit alleging that the major U.S. bank, J. P. Morgan Chase, knew that Madoff's operation was a Ponzi scheme, but did not take any steps to stop it. Why? Well, it seems their desire to peddle more derivatives, those financial weapons of mass destruction, was behind it all:
One group of senior Chase bankers was pursuing profitable credit and derivatives deals with Mr. Madoff and his big feeder-fund investors, the hedge funds that invested their clients’ money exclusively with him.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
J.P. Morgan Chase had been Madoff's banker since 1986. There were people there monitoring his daily financial dealings, which should have raised red flags even with a financial neophyte (for instance,me):
On a single day in 2002, Mr. Madoff initiated 318 separate payments of exactly $986,301 to the customer’s account for no apparent reason, the trustee reported. In December 2001, Mr. Madoff’s account received a $90 million check from the customer’s account "on a daily basis," according to the lawsuit.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Hmm. I wonder why this showed up in the news at this time, late in the week, when all eyes are turned to Egypt. The financial industry wants to paint Madoff as a weird, strange (although hugely profitable) exception to business as usual. But news like this makes me wonder.