A friend from Dads night can attest to the fact that on Wednesday I told him I think that Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and so-called “normal” investing in high finance, speculative vehicles is probably very similar in terms of how investors act and gather information.
Paul Krugman’s column in today’s NY Times starts off:
The revelation that Bernard Madoff — brilliant investor (or so almost everyone thought), philanthropist, pillar of the community — was a phony has shocked the world, and understandably so. The scale of his alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme is hard to comprehend.
Yet surely I’m not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?
Sigh. I guess there are worse people to be scooped by.
orgtheory.net
