SEC investigated Madoff eight times

According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, the SEC over a period of sixteen years conducted eight investigations into Bernard Madoff’s investment company, yet failed to turn up his massive Ponzi scheme. The details of the story are too technical for me to follow, but how complicated could the basic problem be? How could the SEC not see the fraud, once they suspected a fraud and were looking for fraud? Madoff was claiming to have made and to be managing tens of billions in investments in various securities on behalf of his clients. Those investments did not exist. Madoff made them appear to exist, by continually transferring money from his newer “investors” to his older ones. How could the non-existence of the securities that were supposedly the main business of his company not be discovered by SEC investigators who were suspicious of his methods and were trying to figure out what he was up to?

It’s one thing for everybody to avoid noticing that the emperor is naked. But once a professional team of naked-emperor investigators has been assigned to determine if the emperor is wearing clothes or not, how long would it take to found out?

Perhaps the SEC outsourced the investigation to India.

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John D.writes:

LOL! Glad to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 05, 2009 09:00 AM | Send