Bernie Madoff Research Paper

Words: 474
Pages: 2

In December of 2008, on the eve of the turmoil following the financial collapse, a large hedge fund, well known within Wall Street, was hemorrhaging assets. This is not unusual, given the timeframe, as a lot of hedge funds and other investment firms were going bankrupt around this same time; however, this one was different. It was ran by a man named Bernard Madoff—a man who had spent his entire adult life on Wall Street dealing in finance. He had at one time been an executive officer of NASDAQ, one of the largest securities exchanges in the country, well respected and envied by his peers, but by this time in his life his power was waning.
As investors continued to pull out of his firm—not because he wasn’t bringing in a consistent return, as he always did, even in the worst of times, but because his investors simply needed their money to weather their own storms—his giant amalgamation of lies was quickly unfolding. As you are probably already aware, Bernie Madoff had been running a ponzi scheme, and it was about to spill out into the open. So, foreseeing his inevitable future, on the 11th of
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However, that, in and of itself, was not the most unusual part of the story, because, despite the general public not being aware of Mr. Madoff’s dealings until that day, many others outside of Madoff’s inner circle had known for some time. In fact, Harry Markopolos , a financial analyst, had discovered Madoff’s scam years before its collapse. After the collapse, when he felt safer to speak on the subject , Mr. Markopolos gave an interview to 60 Minutes; in which he described how he had tried on numerous occasions to report his discovery to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the law enforcement agency empowered by congress to monitor and regulate the financial markets. However, after each attempt to disclose what he knew, the SEC did