By rob

September 17, 2009 7:25 AM | Link to this

You must be joking, all Madoff investors lost money because of their own greed or stupidity, most guilty of the former.

By HM

July 15, 2009 10:26 PM | Link to this

It never ceases to amaze me how bankers and BS artists alike howl to keep government out of ‘the market’….until everyone is broke, or worse.

They want profit to be strictly private, with as little taxation as possible…. but the pain of losses needs to be ‘shared’, spread out pubically.

I’ve heard some genuinely sad stories about some of the folks who lost everything with Madoff. But thats why you diversify. And thats why you always keep a weather eye out for BS.

‘If its too good to be true, it is’. By the looks of it, practically ALL of Madoff’s victims have the age and wisdom to understand that saying.

By Tom Glancy

July 5, 2009 10:52 PM | Link to this

It is outrageous that we are even discussing the idea that taxpayer money should be going to deal with these private investment losses. Every day thousands of people are defrauded. Sometimes the victims are completely innocent, sometimes they knew what they were getting into. Sometimes the government performs its policing function poorly, sometimes not. It doesn’t matter. In none of these cases can a fraud victim come with hat in hand to the taxpayer and demand payment.

These victims have an appalling sense of entitlement. Yes, the SEC screwed up, but these investors should know that that does not make the SEC the guarantor of their losses. Their demands to change the SIPC limits retroactively are nothing more than an attempt to change the rules so that they get more money - money they are not entitled to under the protection afforded them when they invested - at the expense of other covered investors.

If any Congressperson entertains the idea that it is politically wise to alter rules retroactively or directly send taxpayer dollars to these people, they will regret it. A lot of us in this area are watching this issue and we will not tolerate any kind of giveaway to a special class of investor. There are only a few hundred individual investors pushing this idea. There are many hundreds of thousands of voters who would be outraged.