Sesame Street explains the Madoff Scandal

[jducoeur]

Thanks to Between the Lines for the pointer to this lovely little video about economics. Okay, it's probably not really from Sesame Street, and it's not in any way accurate.¹ But regardless of correctness, it is rather viscerally satisfying...

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¹ I find most of the "Madoff is Evil Incarnate" hype to miss the point: the scary thing is that I suspect he simply fell into an easy trap of his own making, and that most people, after the first few steps, would have made just the same decisions he did. The thing about pyramid schemes is that they are easy to start, and *very* hard to stop. You get deeper and deeper so fast that all you can do is keep feeding the monster until it eats you. Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if it started the same way as the Satyam mess: cooking the books just a little to smooth out a glitch, and then covering over each successive layer until all you have left is the fraud...

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Going crazy at work, so I have no time to tie the citations down. But there was a lot of reliable sounding information on both the New York Times web site, and Ritholtz.com about how the SEC could find nothing to support evidence that he invested, and if I recall, his allocution said the same thing.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

And I can't remember - but a very long article on either Slate or Salon.