Yes, and the head of GMAC Financials…is one of the big losers in this scam.

Here is another interesting article about all of this and the Fed Reserve part:

http://www.naturalnews.com/New…..adoff.html

Capitalism is just a giant Ponzi scheme. The only people who actually benefit are those at the top of the pyramid.

Lautenberg looks like a big loser over this, not only his personal and his charities assets, but his conflict of interest, taking large contributions from Madoff. Well, he is too old to run again anyway.

God damn it.
The point of putting the Democrats in power was NOT to turn Democrats into Republicans.
Is there any evidence the candidates knew what was going on?

Other victims:

For a half-century, Arnold and Joan Sinkin worked hard to raise their four kids, put a roof over their heads and build up a nice nest egg for retirement.

The Brooklyn-born couple moved out to Long Island and then down to Florida, where they planned to spend their golden years living off their nearly $1 million life savings.

That all came crashing down this past week when Wall Street legend Bernie Madoff’s empire of fraud collapsed.

“I put my kids through college, made four weddings, did everything to put away some money,” said Arnold Sinkin, 76, a retired carpet salesman, from the couple’s condo in Boynton Beach, Fla. “Two days ago, it was all wiped out.”

The couple lost about 85% of their life savings and their retirement dreams are gone with the cash.

“Nobody in our lives gave us anything. We worked hard for every penny that we had,” Joan Sinkin, 75, said through tears. “There’s really no more lowlife than that man. My whole life fell apart.”

The Sinkins are among scores of victims who lost everything when Madoff’s exclusive securities firm was exposed as a giant Ponzi scheme.

I heard on the news last week that Madoff was reported several times to the SEC, but they did nothing. How many other Madoffs are out there?

Unlike which other system?

this is what paulson saw. the domino effect will be far reaching. lots of blood suckers are going to go down taking our money with them. has to happen. not enough money to prop up the model. world wide ecomomy is shrinking to adjust.

Great question. Makes me wonder what that “confidential” statement made secretly to Congressional members that made them fear the sky was falling actually was….all the rich people are now poor??? WTF? We should have a right to know what they were told by Bernanke and Paulson! Maybe there is just no money at all…nevermind “credit”. Criminals…all of them…both parties.

Whatup dog?

Bush had just finished his prepared remarks in which he said the security agreement was made possible by the U.S. surge of troops earlier this year, whhen the journalist, Muthathar al Zaidi pulled his shoes off and hurled them at the president. “This is a goodbye kiss, you dog,” Zaidi shouted

wouldn’t that be great to see?

uh ohhh – madoff’s giving repugs more ammo at this time… repugs must be rolling over with glee tho this story is sooo over my head… does rampant greed have anything to do with this???

It’s on MSNBC’s site

We’re hearing that the smart money KNEW Bernie had to be cheating, because the returns he was generating were impossibly good. Many Wall Streeters suspected the wrong rigged game, though: They thought it was insider trading, not a Ponzi scheme. And here’s the best part: That’s why they invested with him.

my bold…

Poetic justice prevails?

yerp

Depends on whose money they were playing with

True dat. Stupidity like this is not one-man deep.

See it right here

Ghu, they get a little money and forget that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
I’m not a bigtime investor, and I’d be leery of any fund that guaranteed profits like that. (Even utility companies won’t do that, and they have a pretty good record on returns.)

IIRC Madoff was investigated in 1992 by the SEC but nothing definitive was turned up. This may have made the SEC less likely to go after him after that. And then when you get to the Bush years, the SEC really stopped functioning. SEC Chairman Cox was virulently anti-regulation.

But the real way Madoff was able to keep his Ponzi scheme going as long as he did was that he ran his hedge fund out of his own securities firm. Usually regulators would be able to get some idea of what was going on by looking at the statements of the securities firm, but in Madoff’s case they were one and the same. I would agree that there was no way in the world that he could have done the kind of bookkeeping needed for this on his own. He could compartmentalize parts of it but there had to be a circle of insiders who helped him out making up the original fictional reports about buys and sells that never happened.

I like this bit from wiki:

Madoff served as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Sy Syms School of Business at Yeshiva University, as well as Treasurer of its Board of Trustees. He resigned his position at Yeshiva University after his arrest.

What does this say about Yeshiva’s Business School? Is it a plus or minus that it was run by one of the biggest crooks in the country?

They will probably have twice as many students next year

Okay, be careful here. Shows bad judgment on the part of the school board, but give Yeshiva-ites some credit. Need I remind people what Yale produced?

Wow! So they thought he was crooked, but that he was cheating the regulatory system. Thus they were going with him because he was doing something that they were afraid they’d be caught doing if they did it themselves.

This is the equivalent of people buying still-boxed TV’s and other things off the back of a pick-up truck behind the apartment house at well “below cost” prices. They know it’s stolen, but they think they won’t be caught buying the stuff, and…after all, they didn’t pull the burglary!

I’m surprised that anyone supposedly giving a 12%/year return wasn’t scrutinized more carefully though. It’ll be very interesting to find out why…although why he would make such donations to the Democrats seems odd, given that they were generally out of the power to control investigations and appointments for over a decade. That’s why most corporate contributions were going to the Republicans and Bush…which means that the vast majority of stuff is still to be unveiled.

Isn’t Michael Milkin a well-paid teacher at USC?

Minus, because it is a disgrace. I expect Gil to have some post about this although he is a graduate of Yeshiva College, not the business school.

Gil has no post, but probably doesn’t need to say anything.

Seems like I recall some reformed scoundrel writing a tell all expose book and then being innundated with people wanting to follow in his footsteps. I am not casting aspersions on the school but those aspiring greedy clowns.

Why anyone here is shocked that the Dems might be sucked into the vortex of corruption, is beyond me. Both parties play the same game. And if you’re really sorry about the current crash, you might want to take a close look at Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, who respectively sponsored in the late 70’s and expanded in the mid-90’s the Community Reinvestment Act, which allowed/forced lenders to abandon prudence in lending to people who were very shaky, indeed impossible, credit risks, because, you know, they “deserved to participate in the American dream.” That PC rubbish, coupled with the bipartisan greedfest on Wall Street that created insanely-leveraged and occult derivatives, coupled also with the decision by FNMA and FMAC to make the CRA paper negotiable in the larger market (decisions made by, or defended by, Democrats such as Raines, Dodd and Frank), led to the immolation of value in which we are now basking. My point about the financial mess is not an excursion from the point about corruption. Corruption is what happens when the guardians are bought off, or begin to believe they are too smart to be tricked. Nobody is immune. The Dems have taken power on a platform of being cleaner. They have one brief chance to prove their case. Their window is closing fast, thanks to Wiliam (Cold Cash) Jefferson, Barney Franks, Chris Dodd, Charles Rangel, Rod Blagojevich. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have been at the wheel for 2 years and what have they done? If they don’t square things away by the summer of 2010, this is over. Just sayin’.

Republican Democrat, the party label doesn’t mean all that much. What matters is they see themselves as Capitalists first and foremost.

who respectively sponsored in the late 70’s and expanded in the mid-90’s the Community Reinvestment Act, which allowed/forced lenders to abandon prudence in lending to people who were very shaky, indeed impossible, credit risks, because, you know, they “deserved to participate in the American dream.”

I see you got your talking points from Rush Limbaugh and the Wingnut PC Patrol.
It was unsupervised mortgage brokers going after easy fees and making bad loans. Of course, it’s always easier to blame poor people and big gubbermint.
Check out Barry Ritholz for some actual facts on this. And he’s not so partisan that he won’t go after Schumer for his involvement.

I will go for facts everytime, JTJT. The Repubs make me almost as sick as the Dems. “Always easier to blame poor people and big gubbermint…” Not quite. We’ve hardly met so I will cut you some slack. But the fact is, I distrust our nature. We are –to borrow a phrase– fallen. Those who honestly believe that a Better System will somehow solve our problem, change our nature? Please give me their names, I have a bridge to sell them. I don’t blame poor people, they are just doing what makes sense under the circumstances. The mortgage brokers were jamming this crap at all of us 24/7 and some of us, the credulous and hopeful who had been taught math in public school by teachers protected by unions so they could avoid showing these saps that they were wrong wrong wrong about reality, those people took the bait. They thought, thanks to Oprah and a million other “self-esteem” gurus, that they could actually afford a $500K house on an income of $25K a year, thanks to the miracle of interest-only liar loans. Until of course the bullet came due. And the next fool –who may have gone to Harvard for an MBA– bought that paper because it had been “backed” by some house that had no incentive not to do so, because hey, the risk had been fully diversified, the quant model said so, and God those premiums were sweet, my bonus this year depends on moving a ton of this stuff, etc.

So I am not blaming the poor people who signed the loans. I blame a lot of people. But mostly I blame those who should have known that PC has no place in the marketplace. That if somebody can’t make the payments, it doesn’t matter what color his skin is, what his creed or background is. The CRA was crap. It helped to fuel the cycle. Other traditional distortions in the market coupled to it. The regulators went to sleep. And who were they? Republicans? Not really, not many. Democrats. If I have a bone to pick right now, it’s with Chris Dodd who took a sweetheart loan from Countrywide, a company he was charged with regulating, and who allowed all those lenders to keep doing suicidal stuff just a little longer. And now he’s lecturing us about accountability? Jesus wept.

“It is ironic, in that Madoff’s personal charity was founded to “reverse intermarriage and assimilation” among American Jews.”

This was not Madoff’s charity, It was the Robert Lappin foundation; it’s endowment was entrusted to Madoff.

Not sure what would be ironic about it anyway.

For someone who goes with facts, this was as close to a fact free rant as you can get. The CRA did not contribute to the problem. In fact, CRA loans, because they were monitored closely and were not useful for pumping up CDOs. As far as changing people’s nature, in some ways no. That’s why strong laws and good policy are important. Money corrupts politics, and vast concentrations of money find a way into the wrong hands.

As far as “PC has nothing to do in the marketplace,” that is also incorrect. People who are discriminated against leave the market, and don’t come back. This means less economic activity and less efficient markets.

Scandals like this one had nothing to do with making a few loans in a few economically depressed areas. Everyone involved came from the right zip codes and knew the right people.

Okay, be careful here. Shows bad judgment on the part of the school board, but give Yeshiva-ites some credit. Need I remind people what Yale produced?

TRUMP!

Stories that crib verbatim without citing Stirling should be up on the TradMed sites in 5…4…3…2…1…

I have no hope that you will read it, but I urge you to check out this speech by Randall S. Kroszner, one of the Governors of the Federal Reserve Board. It’s entitled
“The Community Reinvestment Act and the Recent Mortgage Crisis” and was given December 3, 2008. It fully debunks (using verifable facts, rather than emotional, and classist talking points) the lie that CRA was in any way responsible for the mortgage crisis. As I say, I’ve no real belief you’ll read it, but perhaps other, less idealogical folks will. People, facts are friendly; embrace them!