Died in prison at 82 of natural causes (renal disease).

https://www.breitbart.com/news/ap-source-ponzi-schemer-bernie-madoff-dies-in-prison/

"He stole from the rich, he stole from the poor, he stole from the in-between." How inclusive! When the IRS showed up at his $7M NYC residence, they asked the bathrobe-clad Bernie "if there is an innocent explanation."

"There is no innocent explanation," he replied.

A bit of good news in the ugly saga:

"A court-appointed trustee has recovered more than $13 billion of an estimated $17.5 billion that investors put into Madoff’s business. At the time of Madoff’s arrest, fake account statements were telling clients they had holdings worth $60 billion."

So some people got back some of their losses.

Making the subject board-relevant, I wonder if the Ensign fund really HAS the $100+ they confessed to (oops, I mean "acknowledged"), or if some of it has been pilfered. You know, paperclips from the supply room and all that.

> Making the subject board-relevant,
> I wonder if the Ensign fund really
> HAS the $100+ they confessed to
> (oops, I mean "acknowledged"), or
> if some of it has been pilfered.
> You know, paperclips from the
> supply room and all that.


The SP who interviewed me, and okayed my non-virginal loins as fit for the mission field, was involved in an affair with a co-worker, and they later 'eloped' and failed to invite their respective spouses.

while no church money was involved, it points to a quite common church failing, i.e., ghawd never seems to tell the relevant authorities about the dirty deeds done cheap under their, the relevant authorities', very noses.

So much testing of the saints' faith!

I dunno. He sounds like he might be a candidate for Christian heaven in the pilfering and false promises branch.

Satan is going to have to fight to get him in hell.

dagny Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I dunno. He sounds like he might be a candidate
> for Christian heaven in the pilfering and false
> promises branch.

Hmmm....Would you mind sourcing that projection? Scripture, a church father (or mother), maybe a theologican? (Joel Osteen doesn't count.)

Sorry, but the mega church preacher televangelists DO count. When the main premise is pay now and get rewards in heaven later, it's a scam.

"24 Another parable He put forth to them, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; 25 but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way. 26 But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared. 27 So the servants of the owner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’ 28 He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us then to go and gather them up?’ 29 But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn." (Matthew's Gospel)

Note the fire imagery.

A scripture? Really?

I will say the threat of fire especially is a creepy and manipulative part of the Christian fraud myths. Let me guess. God favors your type of Christian and everyone else is a tare.


Edited for grammar error.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/14/2021 04:57PM by dagny.

Some anonymous person said that Matthew said that Jesus said...

Welp, that does it! I'm convinced!

I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to take a third or fourth hand account, written decades after Jesus was crucified, as truth about eternity.

Oh, and it’s unlikely that anyone named Matthew was involved in the writing of that gospel.

CrispingPin Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to
> take a third or fourth hand account, written
> decades after Jesus was crucified, as truth about
> eternity.
>
> Oh, and it’s unlikely that anyone named Matthew
> was involved in the writing of that gospel.

Or even possibly written a couple of centuries after Jesus was supposedly crucified...

I think fire is a metaphor for something really awful that you can’t get away from. My experience with Hell seemed to be that it’s an ugly part of the collective unconscious that humans can get attached to through means warned about in the scriptures.

I'll concur that fire is spiritual imagery, just as "streets of gold" are: the difference between torment and bliss that exceeds the capacity of human language, now clichés that lost their punch long ago.

People are comfortable with Christ's message of love and find his moral precepts comfortable if they can pick and choose what they like. But he was an eschatological prophet and spoke judgement--a macroaggression to the human temperament (witness remarks, above).

Most modern folks tilt towards some form of Universalism--that everybody, saint & sinner alike, will somehow, eventually, wind up in the same place, or state. For those with a supernatural or spiritual leaning, it's some variant on "Heaven." For the atheistically inclined, it's some form of extinction of the soul or a vague cosmic "oneness."

As a Christian, I obviously believe in a separation of the lost and the saved. ("This is NOT a dress rehearsal, folks!") Consider the ramifications of Universalism(s): it makes no difference what you believe or how you behave in the endgame. "He who dies with the most toys, wins." Hitler & Mother Theresa are in the same place, as will be the most virtuous, kind-hearted, civic-minded person you know--and the child molester down the street.

Not to mention each and everyone of you (us).

Thus, an eventual "Heaven" or an immediate annihilation of the soul, same difference. Why should I--or you--be "moral," if we're just infinitesimal blips in the cosmos? I'd say (I really don't) let's "go for the gusto," and accumulate all the delightful experiences and goodies we can, even if it's at somebody else's expense. Exercise (exploit) your "natural selection" advantages to the max, and feather your nest (and gene pool) as best you can.

To be "moral" would be borrowing from the religio-philosophical traditions you disdain. And haven't we "progressed" past all that?

Ensign fund has no innocent explanation?

At least his victims got more than half of their money back. I’d love to get half of my money back from the church.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/14/2021 03:38PM by bradley.

Not that I'm excusing Madoff, but I always felt his investors were guilty of greed as well. What he was promising them was in no way realistic nor sustainable. It's a good argument for financial education, but even then greed can cause people to make poor decisions.

Greed all around. Madoff had his, obviously, and his investors had theirs. The regulators too suffered from a sort of avarice too, for they had no incentive to look closely lest they offend powerful entities.

There were private-sector analysts who took his public filings and ran all possible simulations only to discover that there was no mathematically possible way that his strategy could produce those results. Some of them complained to the regulators, but for many years the regulators refused to act.

I would not, however, blame the investors--or at least the smaller investors. No small investor has the expertise or the resources to vet someone like Madoff. They have every right to expect fiduciaries that have regulatory approval to be run legally. So older Jewish friends of his, people all over the country who are investing their retirement funds, etc., are blameless.

This was what happens when 1) a sophisticated man behaves criminally, 2) for indolence or want of resources regulators prematurely grant their imprimatur, and 3) large sophisticated investors fail to do their due diligence. Smaller and less educated investors bear much less responsibility and should be protected in bankruptcy proceedings.

Proves the adage, "If it's too good to be true, it probably isn't."

$:)

summer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Not that I'm excusing Madoff, but I always felt
> his investors were guilty of greed as well.

Some of them were little old ladies. :(

They were "little old ladies" who could have put their money into bank certificates of deposit, or plain vanilla mutual funds from Vanguard, Fidelity, or T. Rowe Price. But they got dollar signs in their eyes and chose to chase high returns instead. Yes, they bear far less responsibility than the major players, but IMO there is personal responsibility involved as well.

A very good point, Summer, but it strikes me as the financial equivalent to "well, look how she was dressed!" argument. For me, that's an ethical conundrum. There's no rationalization for predators' evil (financial, sexual, other), but why attract their attention in the first place?

OTOH: Madoff was aggressive. I recall one anecdote that he pitched a Jewish woman, stranger to him, in an elevator.

Call me a prude, but I myself am comfortable keeping my shoulders covered.

I think it was more along the lines of affinity fraud. He gained their trust because he was a part of their community.

Summer, I think you are too hard on the little old ladies. Those naive investors were not as foolhardy as it might seem.

What I mean is that they were treading where big institutional investors walked. What is "greedy" or wrong or unwise in buying equity in an enterprise that government regulators and big money managers declared, in their annual reports and their financial decisions, safe?

And while diversification is always a good idea, it is almost inevitable that your, or my, or their retirement fund managers lost money in the Madoff fraud. For our "plain vanilla mutual funds" own shares in literally hundreds of operational companies, financial enterprises, and even other investment funds. Take a look at the following list and you'll see that the problem. Virtually any mutual fund will own pieces of some of the following institutions or hold shares in the same companies in which they invest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_investors_in_Bernard_L._Madoff_Investment_Securities

I would go farther and suggest that the old ladies, and the equivalent, who put money directly into Madoff, deserve the greatest protection when something like this happens. After all, the regulators and the big investors are supposed to know better; they have the expertise and the technology and the lawyers to avoid such debacles. Their incompetence, for such it is, should not be rewarded in bankruptcy. But the blue-hair crowd are supposed to be able to rely on the judgment of the regulators. They should get paid off before, and more generously than, the professionals.

I saw that. Honestly, UBS is the only entity listed with whom I would consider investing, and even then, I believe that UBS was playing with their own money. I could be mistaken.

I still think that if individual investors don't make the effort to acquire even a basic financial education, they are vulnerable to being fleeced.

You are mistaken--in a couple of senses. First, UBS plays with others' money. All big financial institutions do. That's where they get their leverage and hence their profits.

Second, assuming you own any mutual funds or have pension funds, you own some of those entities whether you know it or not. Your money managers will almost certainly have shares, direct or through other institutions, in Grupo Santander, Ascot, Fortis, HSBC, Natixis, RBS, BNP Paribas, BBVA, Nomura, etc--and many of the later entries on that list. Those are blue-chip staples. I guarantee that if you were to look at the holdings declared in your mutual funds and pension funds' quarterly or annual reports, you will see many if not most of those names.

Yes, everyone should have basic financial competence. But world-class expertise didn't save anyone in the Madoff scandal. An individual investor can follow all the rules and invest in only the most prestigious firms and will still get hammered in a situation like this. The only thing that the old ladies did wrong was to put too much into this one investment.

More generally, ask not for whom the bell tolls. Calpers and Ontario Teachers, and all their beneficiaries, lost money to Madoff too.

I saw that the Korean teachers' union lost money with Madoff as well. That really bites.

ETA -- You piqued my curiosity, and I looked up how my teachers' pension invests its funds. There are maybe ~350 investment institutions listed. I had no idea! I didn't see any of the names that you mentioned, but I believe you that they are most likely involved.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/17/2021 06:00PM by summer.

Yes.

Just think about Nomura, which is a huge Japanese bank with deep ties to all the big US and European investment banks and even retail banks like Wells Fargo. If you have any holdings in the Western institutions, you are a de facto owner of Nomura and other banks that were exposed to Madoff. It was ties of that sort that transformed the 2007 subprime crisis into a global catastrophe.

the Book of Stupid (aka Book of Mormon) says explicitly that people can't repent after they're dead;

also, how could Bernie restore all that he had taken?

restitution is a 4 X part of repentance, says that in both Bible & LDS scriptures....


So, 'baptism for the dead' is, by their own terms, ineffective & worthless...


got that, just sayin'

bernie done madoff ~


with all you exmos money ~



hell is hotter now ~

I wonder if the MORmONs waited for his body to turn room temperature before they dead dunked him!

schrodingerscat Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I wonder if the MORmONs waited for his body to
> turn room temperature before they dead dunked him!

Isn't there a ban on members dead dunking people of Jewish religion/culture/ancestry unless they are directly related to that person?

They violate their own ‘Jew ban’ all the time in the case of big name recruits like Madoff. Imagine how useful he will be in MORmON heaven, talking guys into letting Joe and Brigham spread their seed in their wives and pre-pube daughters!

> They violate their own ‘Jew ban’
> all the time in the case of big-
> name recruits like Madoff.


Wow!

Mormons be nuts!

But I guess ya gotz ta bag them big-name recruits while the bagging is good.