Madoff's Fishy Business

In the past few days, Bernard Madoff’s victims have begun coming forward and proclaiming their ignorance to his scheming. In today’s Financial Times, John Gapper writes, “No one thought that Mr. Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme but plenty of people thought he had an unfair advantage. He was a former Nasdaq chairman and one of Wall Street’s biggest marketmakers. Enough said.” According to Henry Blodget, Madoff was widely suspected on Wall Street of insider trading, and on Time.com, one of Madoff’s victims wrote, “We all hoped, but we knew deep down it was too good to be true, right?” Madoff practically admitted to insider trading during a debate last year, when he said “they’re always doing this.” “The fact,” Gapper writes, “that they believed Wall Street was ‘always doing this’ was not a deterrent; it was a recommendation.”