I already knew a lot about the Madoff scandal before watching this documentary, but I am glad I watched it because I learned a lot of new things. The amount of new footage and testimony in this documentary is impressive. Madoff and associates perpetrated a despicable financial fraud, and I think not everybody has been properly held accountable for it. The documentary does a great job investigating this and shedding new light on the true dimensions of the Madoff scandal.
I find it really odd that SEC did not do a better investigation of Madoff. All they had to do was call the independent clearing house and verify if the trades are actually taking place, a 30-minute exercise. I think it is very much possible that Madoff bribed someone high enough at SEC, and that person (or persons) then intervened internally at SEC and stopped those investigations. This, to me, is a more plausible explanation of SEC's inaction, than just simply blaming their "incompetence". After this documentary, I think SEC should do a new internal investigation on this.
The stories of Madoff's victims are heart-breaking. I wonder if these victims ever considered suing SEC (a government agency), as clearly the SEC's inaction contributed to their losses. Sounds like a good class-action lawsuit scenario to me. SEC exists precisely to protect investors, and especially less-savvy individual investors, from such fraud.
A similar case could perhaps be argued against Chase, the bank that held Madoff's Ponzi scheme bank account, but did not act despite millions of dollars flowing in and out of the account routinely and without any good explanation. Madoff was making large wires in and out of various offshore accounts, which is not a pattern consistent with daily trading. If Madoff was making actual trades as he claimed, then the frequency of those wires should be much higher and their individual amounts much smaller, to settle the supposedly daily trades of US securities. So this was a missed "smoking gun".
I find it really odd that SEC did not do a better investigation of Madoff. All they had to do was call the independent clearing house and verify if the trades are actually taking place, a 30-minute exercise. I think it is very much possible that Madoff bribed someone high enough at SEC, and that person (or persons) then intervened internally at SEC and stopped those investigations. This, to me, is a more plausible explanation of SEC's inaction, than just simply blaming their "incompetence". After this documentary, I think SEC should do a new internal investigation on this.
The stories of Madoff's victims are heart-breaking. I wonder if these victims ever considered suing SEC (a government agency), as clearly the SEC's inaction contributed to their losses. Sounds like a good class-action lawsuit scenario to me. SEC exists precisely to protect investors, and especially less-savvy individual investors, from such fraud.
A similar case could perhaps be argued against Chase, the bank that held Madoff's Ponzi scheme bank account, but did not act despite millions of dollars flowing in and out of the account routinely and without any good explanation. Madoff was making large wires in and out of various offshore accounts, which is not a pattern consistent with daily trading. If Madoff was making actual trades as he claimed, then the frequency of those wires should be much higher and their individual amounts much smaller, to settle the supposedly daily trades of US securities. So this was a missed "smoking gun".