Happy New Who Gives A Damn.

Conditions: Overcast.


Is It All Built On Sand?

Bernard Madoff, for forty years, has been a respected investment broker on Wall Street. His Investment Securities company in Manhattan was known all around the world. And it has now been revealed as possibly the world's biggest ripoff. A 50 billion dollar black hole. That's nine zeros, son. How is this even possible?

Madoff told the FBI he had been running a "giant Ponzi scheme", a classic pyramid fraud. Instead of investing the money, as claimed, he was using cash from new investors to pay existing ones. As investigators rummage through Madoff's office, they have found numerous sets of accounts, ones showing the real flows in and out of his business, and ones which were shown to clients. They believe it is more than 20 years since he began managing other people's money, initially to generate business for the long-standing stockbroking business he founded in 1960 with $5,000 he made as a Long Island lifeguard. His first lie, his first fraudulent book entry, remains unknown.

By the end, the scale of the deception was staggering - it is little wonder Madoff's lawyers are reportedly mulling an insanity defence. Each month, investors got a complicated statement showing lists of blue-chip companies that Madoff had traded using a "sophisticated" formula, and each month it showed a tidy profit totalling double-digit annual returns almost every year. These statements were fake and more than a few Wall Street professionals admitted to being mystified as to how Madoff managed this miracle-grow performance.

- truthout.org/

Well, frankly, this is how Wall Street really works. You trust people and companies and somehow the wheels turn and the dials flicker and gradually you make money. And some people are somehow able to make more money than others. Surely there are controls, or tells that monitor what these funds are really doing?

Boston - His repeated warnings that Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff was running a giant Ponzi scheme have cast Harry Markopolos as an unheeded prophet.

But people who know or worked with Markopolos say it wasn't prescience that helped him foresee the collapse of Madoff's alleged $50 billion fraud. Instead, they say diligence and a strong moral sense drove his quixotic, nine-year quest to alert regulators about Madoff.
[...]

Markopolos waged a remarkable battle to uncover fraud at Madoff's operation, sounding the alarm back in 1999 and continuing with his warnings all through this decade. The government never acted, Madoff continued his ways, and people lost billions.

Markopolos reached his conclusion with the help of mathematicians like Dan diBartolomeo, whose analysis of the Madoff's methods in 1999 helped fuel Markopolos' suspicions.

"People should have seen the writing on the wall," diBartolomeo said.
[...]

Researching Madoff's numbers, using data the firm distributed to prospective investors, diBartolomeo concluded within hours that it was impossible for Madoff to get the returns he reported while using the strategy he said he used.

"As the market goes up and down, this strategy should have done a little better or a little worse, just like everybody else," he said. "Instead, it appeared to be indifferent as to whether the market went up or down. They made money all the time."

- truthout.org/

And he's not the only one: With the collapse of Madoff's scheme there's a whole bunch of prophets crawling out of the woodwork to talk about how they were right all along. So how come nobody did any investigating back before it all crashed down? Is every investment scheme just a pyramid scam? Is the stockmarket just a giant pile of air? Is that why no one listened to these whistleblowers? And is that why the Bush administration was so desperate to shove 800 billion dollars of taxpayer money into it before Christmas to keep it standing upright? Here's a thought for the new year: exactly how real is the ground our entire economy is built on?




Film Review: No Country For Old Men.

There's some hard truths to be faced in this world. The good guys usually don't win. The bad guys usually don't get what's coming to them. Things generally don't turn out for the best. It's rough, spend twenty minutes watching CNN and you can tell that. Which is why I like movies, they generally create a world in which things happen the right way, even if they start off the wrong way. But not all the time, and No Country for Old Men is one of those times. This film tells the slightly convoluted tale of good people getting dragged down into the messed up world of bad people. It's set down in Texas, made to look even more barren and hopeless than usual.

There is no comfort here. The 'good' characters struggle, but always in vain. The film has a plot, but it is mostly driven by the character played by Javier Bardem, a meciless hired killer tracking down a case of money and killing anyone in the way. He's chasing the resourceful but ultimately outmatched Josh Brolin, and is somewhat being chased by the exhausted lawman played by Tommy Lee Jones, who's heart just isn't in it anymore. The moral of the story is that true bad guys do things that the good guys struggle to understand, let alone stop or even solve. And ultimately the lesson is that it's all hopeless.

I think what it really comes down to is the simple fact that I do not enjoy the lesson that this film is teaching. I appreciate the message, much as I appreciate the means. - This is a well made and acted film. But ultimately movies are for hope, not hopelessness. Two bullets out of Five.


- Peace out