Madoff Conviction Sends Shudders Through the Financial Industry

A hour ago Bernard Madoff pled guilty to what has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history.  Is seems that Mr. Madoff bilked quite a few people out of billions of dollars by telling them that he had a secret way of beating the market.  He always paid dividends that were much higher than the return other investors were making on their investments. He was a miracle worker, or so it seemed.  In actuality he was simply using new investor’s money to pay old investors: a classic Ponzi scheme.  It worked well for a long time – all he had to do was to keep finding new investment dollars. The collapse of global economy sort of put an end to new investments in Bernie’s scheme and that, ultimately, proved to be very inconvenient for him and somewhat more inconvenient for his investors who had gotten used to making remarkable earnings on their investments.  Bernie will be sentenced, probably to life in prison, in a few months or so.  His investors? Probably out of luck – their money is just gone.

As massive as the Madoff Ponzi scheme was, it pales in comparison to the Worldwide Real Estate Ponzi scheme that is responsible for the global loss of somewhere between $30 and $50 trillion of wealth (yes, trillion).  Just thinking about that number for a moment puts Obama’s $800 billion stimulus into perspective, doesn’t it?  One thing to note is that there is not enough money in the U.S. Treasury and probably not even enough money printing capability in the U.S. to provide refunds to everyone who lost part or all of their wealth.  It’s just gone.

The question now is: what should happen to the people who perpetrated this truly massive Ponzi scheme on the world? What should be done with all those whose complicity in this insane scheme directly led to the loss of millions of people’s 401k and 529 fund values?  What should be done to those who created Liar Loans?  What should be done to those who misrepresented the value of property in order to get a mortgage approved?  What should be done to those who rated toxic mortgages as AAA-rated?  What should be done to the bankers who sliced and diced the toxic mortgages and flipped them as fast as they could to the entire world?  What should be done to those who sold mortgage insurance on these toxic mortgages, called credit default swaps, knowing full well that their company couldn’t begin to cover the losses if these mortgages weren’t paid?  What should be done to the Wall Street bankers who took TARP bailout money, taxpayer funds meant to keep their banks from dissolving into a slimy, black pool of toxic sludge, and handed out multimillion dollar bonuses to the very people who created this gigantic Ponzi scheme?

Pretty good questions, huh?  Well, it turns out I’m not the only one who’s asking.  David Segal reports in today’s New York Times that federal investigators are starting to ask, more or less, the same questions.  It’s about time.  Isn’t it sort of surprising that Bernie Madoff rips off a fairly small number of very wealthy investors and before you can say “Free Market Capitalism” he’s hauled off to court and pleads guilty to an historic crime.  Meanwhile, as literally billions of people suffer from the greedy antics of our completely-out-of-control financial industry, we are just getting around to sort of starting to begin to think about maybe checking to see if anyone can be found who might possibly be responsible for the Worldwide Real Estate Ripoff.

So what do we do? What if it turns out that all the leaders of our financial industry are culpable?  What if every last one of our big time bankers is a crook?  Do we throw them all in jail? No, of course not. We need them – remember? Our banks are too big to fail.  Our bankers must also be too big to replace, right?  That’s why we can’t nationalize the banks: all the knowledge of the financial industry resides with these people. Who would run our financial industry if all the crooks were all in jail? The sad reality is this: we can’t throw them all in jail. The solution: find some scapegoats. Find a few of the top dogs, maybe 0.00 1% of the financial industry who probably can’t duck or hide from some massive financial fraud charges and haul them off to court and throw them in jail. Maybe they can get a cell next to Bernie.

Then we declare ourselves to be cleansed of the toxic infection and we take a few moments to mourn over the billions of people who lost their fortunes.  Everyone will feel a lot better and then we will turn our attention to rebuilding our economy.  Then we turn over the task of creating a new financial industry, with built in safeguards against any more Worldwide Real Estate Ponzi schemes, of course, to the same people who got us into this mess.

And then we start all over again.