As we watch the complete meltdown of Wall Street, I have to find a moment to laugh at the misery of those who swore they knew better than me.
Perhaps it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said, "The rich are different from us because they have more dollars, but we have the sense."
The latest Wall Street disaster proves this quote. Bernie Madoff's $50 billion dollar ponzi scheme is causing a lot of "smart money" people to admit their Ivy League educations are utterly worthless when faced with the smarts of Mr. Haney from Green Acres.
The worst part of Madoff's hedge fund going to hell was that way back in 2001 some people knew that his numbers weren't adding up. But damned if that caused anyone with a few billion to spare from dumping their investments into his mystery black box which pumped out a constant return on cash.
So why did these smart and skeptical investors keep investing? They, like many Madoff investors, assumed Madoff was somehow illegally trading on information from his market-making business for their benefit. They didn't consider the possibility that he was clean on that score but running a good old-fashioned Ponzi scheme.
http://finance.yahoo.com/...
Heaven forbid he be pulling a crime on the investors instead of felonies for the investors!
If one person involved in this scheme begs for a dime of bailout cash from Hank Paulson, we should have the right to spit on their shoes and send them home with their mink-lined Santa sack empty. Somehow I suspect certain Southern Senators being more supportive of people who were defrauded by Madoff than the average UAW member who finds sales down because guys like Madoff screwed the system.
Madoff and his kind don't merely need a perp walk - they need to put in stocks and attacked with rotten tomatoes. Why did we get rid of this proper form of societal justice? Either way, anyone who invested with guy deserves to get nothing. In fact, all of their money should be seized since its quite obvious they wanted to get in with a gangster and not invest with a legit firm that actually publishes its holdings. They might has well have been investing in a drug kingpin's empire (which quite a few probably imagined).