Free Republic

Forgotten or semi-forgotten in the hullabaloo over Al Gore netting a cool hundred million from the sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera is that back in 2009 the ex-veep was on his way to being the first carbon billionaire off global warming. It’s unclear how close he came to accomplishing that goal, but it’s a safe bet he didn’t do badly, considering his lifestyle. (Well, this house apparently went to Tipper in the breakup.) Whatever else he is, Gore is arguably a business genius when it comes to generating massive amounts of income from dubious enterprises and, unlike Bernie...

Now we are expected to believe that Bernie Madoff, once a star of the one-percenters, could run the kind of elaborate Ponzi scheme he did and steal billions under the nose of the SEC, but not know how many sleeping pills he and his wife needed to take themselves out. Like he finally forgot how to count. Apparently Madoff and his wife Ruth, who failed spectacularly at killing themselves, apparently now intend to kill the rest of us telling their pathetic story. Somehow a thief and rat like Bernie Madoff is still treated as if he should be in beer...

There goes Rick Perry again, saying things that make liberals’ heads explode. Speaking to a crowd in Iowa this weekend, the Texas governor and GOP presidential hopeful doubled down on statements he made in his book, Fed Up!, that Social Security is essentially a pyramid scheme. “It is a Ponzi scheme for these young people,” Perry said. “The idea that they’re working and paying into Social Security today, that the current program is going to be there for them, is a lie. It is a monstrous lie on this generation, and we can’t do that to them.” The left reacted,...

Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, says SEC may have destroyed documents“From what I’ve seen, it looks as if the SEC might have sanctioned some level of case-related document destruction,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, in a letter to the agency’s chairman, Mary Schapiro. “It doesn’t make sense that an agency responsible for investigations would want to get rid of potential evidence. If these charges are true, the agency needs to explain why it destroyed documents, how many documents it destroyed over what timeframe, and to what extent its actions were consistent with the law.” Agency staff “destroyed...

Several days ago, Steven Jones of Dow Jones Newswires – a News Corporation company – broke what may be the story of the Millennium, literally. According to 69 recent SEC filings that have now “vanished”, a Texan by the name of Johnny Earl Satterwhite claims to hold over $8 trillion in public companies like Microsoft, Exxon Mobil and City National Bank, among others. Jones also obtained documents that show Satterwhite falsely warranting his ownership of almost one trillion shares in Microsoft. This is 100% impossible, as Jones brilliantly notes... that's more than the 8.4 billion shares Microsoft has issued in...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff said in a magazine interview published Sunday that new regulatory reform enacted after the recent national financial crisis is laughable and that the federal government is a Ponzi scheme. "The whole new regulatory reform is a joke," Madoff said during a telephone interview with New York magazine in which he discussed his disdain for the financial industry and for its regulators. ... Madoff did an earlier New York Times interview in which he accused banks and hedge funds of being "complicit" in his Ponzi scheme to fleece people out of billions...

Bernard Madoff, the disgraced financier, accused the investors whose money he lost in a £40 billion Wall Street investment fund of being greedy. 'Everyone was greedy,' Bernard Madoff told New York magazine.'I just went along' Photo: AP Madoff, who is serving a 150-year prison sentence, also rubbished the financial reforms introduced by the US to prevent future corruption and claimed: "The whole government is a Ponzi scheme". He added: "These banks and these funds had to know there were problems". "It was a nightmare for me," he said. "Even the regulators felt sorry for me ... They said 'how did...

Bernard Madoff has admitted that running the biggest financial fraud in history was a "head trip" as some of the world's biggest banks threw money at him to manage. "The chairman of Banco Santander came to see me, the chairman of Credit Suisse came down, chairman of UBS came down," Mr Madoff told the New York Magazine in an interview. "It feeds your ego. All of a sudden, these banks which wouldn't give you the time of day, they're willing to give you a billion dollars." In an in-depth interview conducted over 12 telephone calls from his prison in North...

Citigroup saw several red flags in the dealings of Bernard Madoff's firm years before his multibillion-dollar fraud was exposed in late 2008, the firm's liquidator said in a newly unsealed lawsuit. Irving Picard, a court-appointed trustee seeking to recover money for former Madoff clients, made the accusations in one of several complaints he has filed against big banks he says "enabled" the massive, decades-long Ponzi scheme by turning a blind eye to it. "Citi had access to and received information placing it on inquiry notice that Madoff's advisory business was potentially a fraud, and/or that Madoff was making hundreds of...

Besides Wilpon's personal relationship with Madoff---when the Mets negotiated larger contracts with star players — complex deals with signing bonuses and performance incentives — they sometimes placed deferred compensation with Madoff.....a strategy that allowed the Wilpons to make money for themselves. There was never much doubt: “Bernie was part of the business plan for the Mets,” a former employee said. Wilpon also encouraged friends to invest. A fellow LIRR commuter, Robert Tischler, came to own a piece of an apartment building with Wilpon and Wilpon’s BIL, Saul Katz. When they sold, Wilpon suggested he invest some of his profits with...

The trustee liquidating Madoff’s asset management firm, has filed a complaint against JPMorgan Chase, claiming the bank had suspicions about Madoff’s Ponzi scheme going back to at least 2006, but waited until 2008 to alert authorities while it earned hundreds of millions of dollars from doing business with Madoff. The complaint seeks to recover nearly $1 billion in fees and profits, and an additional $5.4 billion in damages, for JPMorgan Chase’s decades-long role as primary banker for Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities’ (BLMIS), allegedly aiding and abetting Madoff’s fraud. “Incredibly, the bank’s top executives were warned in blunt terms about...

A high-level JPMorgan risk officer was warned that Bernie Madoff had “a well-known cloud” over his head and was suspected of running a Ponzi scheme nearly 18 months before he was charged, according to the FT. The lawsuit in which it's alleged that the executive was forewarned was filed against JPMorgan by Irving Picard, the trustee responsible trying to recover as many funds as possible for Madoff. It has just been unsealed, and was filed secretly at JPMorgan’s request. The suit aims at recovering $1 billion in fees and profits that JPMorgan earned as the primary banker to Madoff’s firm...

Countrywide’s VIP program is the first subpoena target for House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), said a committee aide. The “Friends of Angelo” program, named for former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, has been under committee investigation since 2008 for allegedly granting generous mortgage deals to influential government officials, lawmakers and employees at Fannie Mae. “Countrywide orchestrated a deliberate and calculated effort to use relationships with people in high places in order to manipulate public policy and further their bottom line to the detriment of the American taxpayers even at the expense of its own lending standards,”...

Bernard L. Madoff said he never thought the collapse of his Ponzi scheme would cause the sort of destruction that has befallen his family. In his first interview for publication since his arrest in December 2008, Mr. Madoff — looking noticeably thinner and rumpled in khaki prison garb — maintained that family members knew nothing about his crimes. But during a private two-hour interview in a visitor room here on Tuesday, and in earlier e-mail exchanges, he asserted that unidentified banks and hedge funds were somehow “complicit” in his elaborate fraud, an about-face from earlier claims that he was the...

When Bernie Madoff popped up in the news again last week, this time when it was alleged that his bankers at JP Morgan Chase saw red flags in his actions but failed to tell the authorities, I felt that familiar feeling again--nothing. Because I don't hate Bernie Madoff. Why should I? SNIP I shed no tears for Madoff, but nor do I clench a fist. Madoff didn't do anything to me. However, if I were forced to join an investment fund that I knew to be a Ponzi scheme and made to watch helplessly as my dollars were sucked out...

The overseer trying to recover funds for Bernie Madoff's victims slapped J.P. Morgan Chase with a $6.4 billion suit Thursday, claiming the bank turned a blind eye to the mega-fraudster's swindling. Trustee Irving Picard says officials at J.P. Morgan, Madoff's longtime banker, should have spotted red flags alerting them to the Ponzi scheme. "Just as in the children's fable, they knew the 'Emperor had no clothes,' but looked the other way, allowing the fraud to continue," Picard's lawyer, Deborah Renner, said Thursday. The bank "admitted in the months before Madoff's arrest that ... returns were too good - especially in...

Mets owners are in a much tighter squeeze than they are letting on. Sterling Equities, which is controlled by Wilpon and son, Jeff, is supposedly worth some $750M and $1B. The Wilpons want to replace roughly $750M,...their losses with convicted Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff.....and are now in settlement talks with the Madoff estate trustee, who claims they withdrew $48M more than they invested. They are opposing a move to unseal legal papers, saying the papers are attempted "character assassination"..... painting [Mets owners] as persons who should have known that Madoff did no trading".........

The court-appointed trustee recovering money for Bernard L. Madoff's victims is preparing a wave of new lawsuits seeking to wrest funds away from investors who also were duped by the Ponzi scheme. In an interview, Irving Picard said he could wind up suing about half the estimated 2,000 individual investors he has called "net winners" from their dealings with Mr. Madoff. Such investors withdrew more from Mr. Madoff's firm than the amount of principal they invested. "The people who made money, who got more, have made money at the expense of the people who didn't," said Mr. Picard, who has...

Bernard Madoff has mocked the investors he swindled out of $65bn (£45bn), reportedly saying that he "carried them" for 20 years and that he took money from "greedy" rich people who wanted more. The revelations come from an extended piece in New York Magazine, in which fellow inmates discussed Madoff's behaviour and actions during his time at New York's Metropolitan Correctional Centre (MCC) and the federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, where he is serving his sentence. During his time at the MCC, he reportedly told one fellow prisoner that the crime was not fully of his own making, and...

Cap-And-Trade: While senators froth over Goldman Sachs and derivatives, a climate trading scheme being run out of the Chicago Climate Exchange would make Bernie Madoff blush. Its trail leads to the White House. Lost in the recent headlines was Al Gore's appearance Monday in Denver at the annual meeting of the Council of Foundations, an association of the nation's philanthropic leaders. "Time's running out (on climate change)," Gore told them. "We have to get our act together. You have a unique role in getting our act together." Gore was right that foundations will play a key role in keeping the...