Please don’t be cross with me. I really thought I had seen this subject line and I skipped over it at that time but now I cannot find it. I even used the search feature.
So, anyway, did you see it? What did you think? Do any of you know anyone who was affected?
I thought it was really good. Richard Dreyfuss did a great job.
Saw it. I thought it was very well done. I didn’t know anyone personally but several of my parent’s friends lost everything.
Saw it. I thought it was excellent. I’m not a Blythe Danner fan but I thought she was awesome. So was Richard Dreyfus.
As far as Madoff himself is concerned, what a psychopath!!
Man (BM) is very adaptable.
I did think it was very interesting. I especially liked the 20/20 afterward with the secretary and DIL.
Many people who ‘lost everything’ really didn’t. They have recovered $11B of the $17B originally thought lost. They are still approving claims. These people were investing in non-secured pools. If they would have invested in secured funds (FDIC insured) they wouldn’t have lost anything, but the growth would have been 1-2%, and Madoff was ‘giving’ them 10-12%. If they had invested through another fund, there would have been big losses too. Every fund lost a lot in 2007-8. Too good to be true was, in fact, too good to be true.
The SEC didn’t do its job.
DH watched it but I left to go on CC after about 45 minutes. I prefer to watch entertainment shows where I actually like at least one of the characters! (That was my problem with Revenge as well!)
As a Mets fan, i find the whole thing way too painful to watch (actually, had no idea there was a mini-series.)
I think that the $17B is the principal that was invested with him. If you include what people thought they had, it’s more like $65B or so.
One of the saddest things I ever heard about what Madoff did was in an interview with a woman who said, “He took my past, my present and my future.” For many people, a lot of the funds they invested with him was money that their parents and grandparents had earned and left them. That’s their past. Their present is that they had to quickly downsize so they could live within their greatly diminished means. And their future? They will have nothing at all to leave to their children and grandchildren.
That would make me so angry and sad.
We enjoyed watching the series. But gotta say… I still don’t completely understand what was going on at the legit 19th floor vs the shady 17th floor.
But what they thought they had doesn’t matter. I bought a Powerball ticket and could have won. Doesn’t mean I lost $1.4 billion, I only lost what I put in, $2. You could argue they also lost the reasonable investment income, not the inflated 12% but the 5% or so other made in honest funds, but that was the risk taken when they thought they were getting the greatest return in the world, better than others were getting, much better than they’d get in a bank. And many of those 5 percenters lost too, sometimes just invest funds, many their principal.
The people knew there was a risk. I bought an IRA last year and could have bought one at a bank at a whopping .8% interest, but went with one at a fund instead. So far I’ve lost $500 of my $6500. It’s the risk I took when I could have about $6505 if I’d gone with the bank. I wanted to make more, so took the risk.
I do feel bad for those who lost through pension plans and other group investments. They usually have no say in where their funds are invested. The SEC should have protected them better.
I don’t think it’s the same thing as buying a Powerball ticket for $2 and not winning $1.4 billion. With Powerball, no one sent you statements for years telling you that your account was worth $1.4 billion and no one told you that the funds were available any time you wanted to withdraw them. It’s a logical conclusion that you really do have $1.5 billion to your name. You live your life based on that assumption – for example, spending a lot of money to set up elaborate trusts and so forth, so your children and grandchildren will be provided for. No one gets reimbursed those fees, do they.
I understand that there’s a risk with any investment. But with any real investment, you know when it’s working and when it’s not. If you lose some of your principal, you have the opportunity to look around and assess if you can do better in another investment. You have the same facts as everyone else and the same opportunities as everyone else. With Madoff, investors had no facts at all with which to make up their minds. The “facts” they thought they had were all fantasy.
I don’t fault the people who were taken in. I completely fault Madoff.
I didn’t watch - it was on , but I was working (probably on CC). A relative “in the business” thought it was very well done including all the pertinent technical points - to the point that some references might be lost on the general watching public.
Truly an amazing circumstance - I followed the story as it unfolded. All but unbelievable.
I’m ticked that I missed this! Maybe it will be on Hulu?
We watched it and found it interesting. The private investors knew, or should have known, what they were getting into. The returns were ridiculous and there clearly was a good deal of greed involved here. As was said, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. I, too, feel for those whose pension funds invested. They had no control over it. This doesn’t absolve Madoff and his pals in any way from what they did.
I thought Richard Dreyfus was amazingly creepy as Bernie. I found myself feeling sorry for his wife and sons. What a narcissist and bully.
I watched it on the ABC app. It was available the next day if your cable provider is a partner (we have direct tv)
I think the whole family dynamic was Shakespearean – the secretive father, the perhaps-duped sons, the perhaps-duped mother who chooses to support the husband over the estranged sons, the sons’ early deaths and the eventual total loneliness of the mother. It’s a classic tragedy.
But you can get statements from any stock, legit ones, and lose it all before you cash in. That’s the risk of the stock market.
The guy was a con man.
I was involved in a lot of the bank failures. I think most of the officers, owners, directors started out honestly but got into trouble trying to cover losses, trying to ride out one bad deal by making another deal but when that deal also went bad they just kept trying to fix it. Madoff seemed to start that way too but found it was so easy to lie to people he kept it up. What amazed me was that he couldn’t even spend all the money he was stealing. He couldn’t take vacations for any length of time because he couldn’t leave the office. There was only so much consumer stuff he could buy, and will he spent millions, he couldn’t spend billions. His lawyer couldn’t spend it either and that’s why they recovery $7B from him.
Trump can’t spend it. Gates can’t spend it. It just isn’t possible to spend all that money.
I guess I’m the only one who thought it was poorly written and boring. Dreyfuss and Danner were great, but couldn’t get beyond the script. (I also hated the son who wants to be “my own man”. If you want to be your own man, go work for someone who’s not your father.)
“Spotlight” it wasn’t.
The Madoff story had a lot of wrinkles to it. Madoff like a lot of people on Wall Street had a huge ego, and with his Ponzi scheme it did start out legitimate, but then Madoff ran into hot water and instead of admitting losses, basically started aggressively getting other people into the fund to cover the losses, and it turned from being an aggressive hedge fund into a Ponzi scheme. The reason he got away with it is a combination of things, for one thing, Madoff being a big player on the street, being one of the founders of the NASDAQ market for example (and Madoff being a big marketmaker), gave him a lot of power, and one of the reasons that Madoff could keep the Ponzi scheme from being investigated all those years was a political thing. I have dealt with the SEC, and it is in a very, very political environment, and Madoff had a lot of political clout. So if someone filed a complaint against Madoff and someone at the SEC went to investigate him, or someone got suspicious of his returns, Madoff and/or his lawyers would likely browbeat the person from the SEC investigating the complaint or whatnot, and if that failed, they would get in touch with some powerful politicians, who would basically call up the head of the SEC and ask them why they were investigating their friend Bernie (in other language).
Understand that the people working for the SEC also don’t like to make waves, because often that compliance person you see at the SEC will gain experience at the SEC, and then will be hired by one of the Wall Street firms (at probably double the pay), so they have every reason not to make waves, and that is one of the reasons it worked for as long as it did. Among other things, the phony trade tickets that supposedly covered the returns on the hedge fund were so sloppy that if it had been investigated even on a surface level, it likely would have been blow out the window.
For the person who asked about the legitimate and illegitimate operations. Madoff operated basically two different businesses, there were the market making and trade operations (a market maker in something like the NASDAQ market is a brokerage firm that trades certain stocks and posts a quote with their buy and sell prices for a particular stock on the NASDAQ quote systems that people can hit, it is how stocks trade on NASD). Those were legitimate operations, the basic nuts and bolts of a securities firm. Then there was the Madoff investment fund, and that was what was illegitimate, that was the Ponzi scheme that we all came to know and loathe. In a sense, the trading firm acted as a cover for the ponzi scheme, they would process some legitimate trades through the trading arm (though if investigated, as I noted above, would not explain the fund making money), but they also created a lot of fake trading tickets that made it look like the fund was trading to its profits.
I don’t know how much people actually got back from Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, to be honest not being a forensic accountant I couldn’t wade through the reality. Funds like Madoff’s generally target well off investors, hedge funds by the very nature are risky, and their fundamental premise is a high rate of return, which in the financial world generally comes about only by taking huge risks. Most hedge funds have gateway investments in the millions of dollars, so it isn’t like most ordinary people would be investing in them knowingly. However, with Madoff, investment managers and advisors and other financial agents invested money in the madoff funds using money from ‘little people’, so they basically were taking ma and pa’s retirement nest egg and investing it in a ponzi scheme…and were showing ma and pa 15% returns (while probably pocketing the 5% between that and what Madoff was ‘returning’ more than likely), a lot of people had money in Madoff who didn’t know it until it went bust. Personally, I think a lot of financial advisors and fund managers who were recruited by madoff (probably with some nice fees to them from Madoff) should have gone to jail as well, in some cases they were treading a very shadowy ethical and legal line by putting money in with Bernie, or any hedge fund for that matter. Their duty is supposed to be towards those they are advising/representing, and among other things, I think they, like the investors in Madoff’s funds directly, had to have suspected it was a scam, Madoff’s funds were returning 20% yields when the markets tanked or were doing well, and anyone with half a bit of investment knowledge knows that is basically a unicorn, a mythical beast, a fund that just goes up and up.
One of the problems with hedge funds is the managers of them have every reason to lie or to basically create a ponzi scheme. When the real estate backed instruments went south in 2008, a number of hedge funds were heavily into these kind of investments, they knew they were under water, and instead of telling the investors they were under water, they literally borrowed from Peter to pay Paul, they borrowed billions from commercial banks to cover withdrawals from their funds, with the collateral being the mortgage backed instruments…which in the end were pretty much worthless. Madoff from what I know hit a downturn at one point, and like the managers of the hedge funds I just mentioned, convinced himself he could work his way out of it, used new investments to cover for people pulling money out, it just took his fund took a look longer to implode then what happened with the hedge funds I was talking about.