Madoff

[Reub]

The Madoff miniseries begins tonight at 8 on ABC. It looks to be well made and might even be instructive. I'll be watching  it for sure.

[dualstow]

The Madoff miniseries begins tonight at 8 on ABC. It looks to be well made and might even be instructive. I'll be watching  it for sure.

Cool. Hadn't heard about that. I'll have to check it out.

[Reub]

I learned that Madoff would have stolen from his own mother. That whoever blinks or speaks first loses in a business transaction. That the more Madoff said no, the more potential clients wanted him to say yes. I learned to trust nobody with your money.
Part two this evening.

[Mountaineer]

Thread drift:  Not Madof but similar.  I watched three episodes of Billions on Showtime.  Bad language and sex with F bombs about every other word but illustrates the greed, every man/woman for himself, ends justify the means, anything goes, stab your friend in the back, free for all aspects of Wall Street, and possibly what is buried sometimes deeply, sometimes barely under the surface, for many of us.  Worth a watch if you have not seen it. 

... M

[Austen Heller]

Darn, looks like I missed part 1, hopefully I can catch it on the web at some point.  I did enjoy the 3rd season of Damages, which was inspired by the Madoff scandal.  It had some big name actors, Glenn Close, Lily Tomlin, Martin Short, Campbell Scott...

Speaking of Billions, I've only seen the first 2 episodes, but man I am hooked!  In fact, I signed up for Showtime just so I could keep watching it.  I am finding that there is tons of other great stuff on Showtime, I have been eye-guzzling Homeland for the last few weeks.

[Reub]

Madoff seemed proud to be the biggest, most successful crook in his prison after he went to jail. He felt no mercy for his victims (including charities) because they were seeking "magic" and all deserved what they got. His wife disowned him for adultery and not for criminality. His 2 sons disowned him. They both later died, one of suicide and the other of cancer. The show made it seem that his sons and wife genuinely did not know that he was running the greatest ponzi scheme in history. They just thought that he was a great investor and businessman. He shielded them from the truth by having them work in the "clean" part of the business on the 19th floor while all the shenanigans went on on the 17th floor below. He bragged that he actually never made a single trade for any of his clients ever and just pocketed all of the billions in his own private accounts and laughs that his personal banks were so greedy that they never raised a warning flag with anyone about all of his deposits.

[dualstow]

I thought it would be streamable at Comcast's site this evening. Nope.

[MediumTex]

I thought it would be streamable at Comcast's site this evening. Nope.

It's on Hulu

[Jake]

The documentary Chasing Madoff http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1636849/ is well worth watching. I had to ignore the stupid "film noir" style of the documentary, which I found highly pretentious and irritating. However, the interviews with the people involved are so fascinating that it is worth it.

[jafs]

A few other facets of this:

Who would believe that you can get an extremely consistent 12% annual return on safe investments?
There was a guy who brought concerns about Madoff's scheme to the SEC numerous times, and they didn't do anything.  According to him, it was obvious Madoff was a fraud.