Can we start shooting these fuckers, yet? Or do we have to wait a little bit longer?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, murder’s wrong, human life is sacred, blah, blah, blah. Fuck it. Pricks like these guys are goddamn plague infested rats and need to be killed for the benefit of humanity. We should not merely string them up from lamp posts, but they should be given a blood eagle, their corpses preserved using plastination, and they should be permanently mounted in front of every business school as a stark reminder of what happens when you fuck up big time.
What should be done with managers of “Fund of Funds”, which were given big fees (1% +) to exercise due diligence and redirect money to serious investment firms?
Fairfield Greenwich Group may have even been a front operation. “Fairfield promised its investors that money could not be moved from its accounts with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities without two signatures. It said that it would independently calculate the value of the funds it invested at Mr. Madoff’s firm at least once a week. It promised to reconcile statements from individual trades with Mr. Madoff’s custodial records.” IMHO only, they lied.
But setting aside cases of outright fraud, I think multi-billion dollar incompetence should be punished with jail time as well. I mean jeez, Madoff’s accounting firm was a joke: it had a total of 3 employees, 2 principles and a secretary.
Kudos to Aksia LLC, who steered their clients away from Madoff and provided the press with an example of how due diligence is suppose to work.
Incidentally, does anybody know why Barry M. hasn’t skipped bail yet? I mean he has to have millions tucked away in a few Swiss banks and his so-called security guards have been hired by his wife. Why isn’t he sunning in Bali by now?
Why execution? Why release his mortal soul from earthly misery? I suggest something more long-lasting and painful, like Chinese Water Torture or Death By 1,000 Cuts.
On second thought, forget torture. Make Madoff work off his debt by flipping burgers at Jack-in-the-Box, @ $7.25/hour, 12 hours per day, every day. Use black magick rituals to prolong his life (by my calculation it will take 1,574,555 years, unless he asks for a raise) and there you have it, his own perfect karmic hell.
While the above carries a certain visceral satisfaction to it, I must ask why, if we have access to black magick rituals, that actually work, why don’t we use them to restore the lost money?
What Measure for Measure said- why is Madoff in jail, while “real” executives who are just as culpable for losing investors’ money are out spending their severance packages?
He should have to do this standing naked in the front window of a Wall street fast food place. Not only for the humiliation, but for the pain of having little grease burns every few seconds as they sizzle and pop and spatter.
I agree-don’t put madoff in jail-just strip him of all his assets-make him work at Home Depot for 11.00/hour-and have him wear a sign around his neck saying" "I am a thief-I stole 10 billion"
First of all, so long as Madoff’s alive he’ll be thinking, “I can get myself out of this, I just have to come up with a good plan.” He’ll be running some kind of scam out of his kitchen, skimming a little meat, grease, or whatever, trying to sell it on the side. Secondly, the wanna-be Madoffs will come to him for advice, they’ll ask them what he did wrong, and figure that they’ll use his “wisdom” so they can pull similar stunts and not get caught. They might even give him kickbacks for his advice (he’ll probably demand it). Lets face it, if a Columbian drug lord can run his own empire from inside a cushy prison (which he built), Madoff can do something similar from inside a fast food joint.
You kill them, and their last moments are filled with suffering, with no delusions that they were “on the verge of getting themselves out of this mess.” Additionally, and, IMHO the more important reason to do this, people will see his preserved flayed corpse and think, “Jesus fuck! That bastard screwed up! No way do I want to end up like him!” It bypasses the intellectual centers of the brain and goes right for the reptile part, they can’t console themselves thinking that once he got out of prison he lived confortably on his hidden billions. (How’s old Ivan Boesky doing these days?) In stark terms, its illustrated that he paid the ultimate price for his crimes, and that anyone who tries to follow in his footsteps will suffer the same price.
More seriously, we really and truly need better enforcement from both the private and public sectors. We also need to set up a financial structure that takes into account the ebb and flow of public regulation: there will always be jackass administrations who take chainsaws to regulation books.
Still more seriously, I don’t see why public shaming shouldn’t play a more active role. But if we go that route, we should distinguish between:
a) those who should feel shame because they are dishonest (Madoff and to a lesser extent Boesky),
b) those who should feel shame because they are self-serving and delusional (arguably Michael Milken)
c) those who should feel shame because they were insufficiently honest (Milken again and Henry Blodget)
d) those who should feel shame because they were incompetent stewards of the public trust and treasure (Xerox CEO Rick Thoman, participants in the various banking imbroglios that occur every several years)
e) those who were IMO criminally incompetent (possibly Nick Leeson of Barings)
Whilst I understand your sentiments, I’d like to point out that a lot of Madoff’s victims were greedy rich people who should have known something was wrong (you can’t earn the interest he was offering safely).
More importantly, compare the money stolen to the Bush Government’s invasion of Iraq. Far more money completely wasted (and all of it belonging to taxpayers), plus thousands of Allied lives lost.
Actually, it was being sold as a safe investment: 10% per annum. Compare that to stock market returns which can be 20-30% during a good year.
(That was the twist actually: the investment wasn’t “Too good to be true.” Rather it was too safe to be true.)
The victims did not exhibit unusual stupidity in this case IMHO. Their high-paid advisers however were simply not doing their jobs. And the SEC certainly fumbled the ball.
