Security Pie

I would expect plumbers to be doing some good business with all the $100 bills clogging the sewers of downtown New York city (under the smoldering ruins of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers).

Well, today it became clear that some of these dollars came from Bernard L. Madoff the former Chairman of NASDAQ and head of Madoff Securities LLC. Some $50b were flushed down the toilet. Madoff admitted to his employees that his hedge fund was “one big Ponzi scheme”. Which means that investors who got their money out early f****d the investors who were late to pull out. As always, timing is not everything, it is the only thing.

This action is sure to help restore confidence in the financial management of our stock exchanges.

C’mon guys. There are rules. People who wear Italian suits and shoes, walk around with leather bound notebooks, sign cheques with elaborate fountain pens, and drive Bentleys should not lead $50b ponzi schemes. Especially if they operate from well appointed mahogony trimmed offices in lower Manhattan. Offices with rows of computer displays that provide real time market analysis data. I mean: How would we differentiate them from the experts?

NB. Sharon will let me know in a reply to the post that:
1. “Flushing money down toilets” is not a literal statement. It is a figure-of-speech, and figures-of-speech do not clog sewers. But even Sharon will have to agree that had New York bankers tried to flush the paper equivalent of the amounts of money that they destroyed, the sewers would have been clogged shut.*
2. Sharon would claim that I am wrong: Bernard Madoff’s $50b ponzi scheme is NOT sure to restore investor confidence but is actually most certain to cause it to drop even more. To which I retort: Can it?  How low can confidence go?

*Note: Lucky for them that the only thing that suffered in their office was a shift register that no longer uses (or needs) the MSB. That and the 500,000 American employees who are newly converting to stay-at-home bloggers (damn competition).