Lessons of Bernie Madoff-Enron-WorldCom-2008 Housing-Financial Crisis

"CHASING MADOFF is the compelling true story of Harry Markopolos and his team's ten-year struggle to expose the harrowing truth behind the infamous Madoff scandal. Throughout the decade long investigation, Markopolos pieced together a chain of white-collar predators, consisting of financial fraudsters, lieutenants, and henchmen, all linked to the devastating Ponzi scheme. With risk and danger apparent, Markopolos and his loyal team, known as the "The Foxhounds", relentlessly continued to pursue the frightening truth. Finding himself trapped in a web of epic deceit, the once unassuming Boston securities analyst turned vigilante investigator now feared for his life and the safety of his family." That's from the YouTube Page with the video trailer linked to the poster above and is posted below.

More on Madoff and Markopolos shortly, but next let's consider the following used with permission from the WND News Center.

The solution to Big Tech and the oligarchs

Anyone who thinks Big Tech will be reined in by regulations has not been paying close attention. The following cases exposed years of documented corporate, regulatory and accounting failures. They spotlight massive corruption and mainstream media misses.

· Enron

· Theranos

· WorldCom

· VW "Diesel-Gate"

· Solyndra

· Bernard "Bernie" Madoff

· WeWork

· Lehman Brothers

· Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac (Government Sponsored Enterprises/GSEs).

Collectively, that list involved hundreds of billions of dollars in losses by investors. Various types of fraud, corruption and deception occurred. Because taxpayers and the broader economy were impacted by Lehman Brothers and GSEs housing-finance scandals, those cost Americans trillions of dollars.

John Kenneth Galbraith said: "Regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them … become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile." Bingo.

Modern robber barons are dominating information and capital. Cold Fusion's documentary about the Theranos' scandal observed: "It's the illusionary effect where if you repeat a lie enough times people start to believe it, especially if you have credible names surrounding the product."

Problematic products are from corrupt companies.

Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes is shown with then Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama. In the massive Enron scandal, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling are shown with then President George W. Bush (R). Those establishment politicians are sufficient to make the point of the "illusionary effect" of "repeating a big lie enough times" when "credible names" are involved.

Harry Markopolos and his colleagues spent years trying to get public officials and mainstream media to expose the massive Bernie Madoff fraud they knew existed. Forbes says Madoff losses may have exceeded $50 billion.

Other regulatory failures are hiding in plain sight. The New York Times quoted Warren Buffett: "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

Buffett's "class" profited wildly in the 2008 and 2020 economic upheavals. How? CNBC quoted billionaire Bill Gates: "I didn't even want to meet Warren because I thought, 'Hey this guy buys and sells things, and so he found imperfections in terms of markets, that's not value added to society, that's a zero-sum game that is almost parasitic.'"

The CDC defines parasitic: "A parasite is an organism that lives on or in a host organism and gets its food from or at the expense of its host."

Buffett said, "The most important thing for me is figuring out how big a moat there is around a business. What I would love, of course, is a big castle and a big moat with piranhas and crocodiles."

When carefully examined, these oligarchs and their businesses employ "parasitic" "moat" and "sabotage monopoly" methods. They create a slow-motion monopoly of various markets. Experts like James Schmitz say monopolies "inflict great harm on low- and middle-income Americans."

The solution? Enforce existing laws. Break these pernicious giants up. They cause social, economic and moral harm. Once broken up, watch the economy and America soar.

L. A. "Tony" Kovach ##

That post on the World Net Daily (WND.com) was published on May 11, 2021 and since then two of the key figures in the Theranos scam have since been convicted and imprisoned.

Also since that post above, Sam Bankman Fried (SBF) in the FTX scandal was tried and found guilty. The judge in that case, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, per left-leaning Reuters: “found that FTX customers lost $8 billion, FTX's equity investors lost $1.7 billion, and that lenders to the Alameda Research hedge fund Bankman-Fried founded lost $1.3 billion. He imposed an $11 billion forfeiture order and authorized the government to repay victims with seized assets.”

Regarding the 2008 housing financial crisis. By 2014, per the left-leaning New York Times, reported that only one top banker went to jail, Kareem Serageldin. By 9.19.2018: "Forty-seven bankers were sentenced to jail time for their role in the financial crisis, Financial Times research has found." Left-leaning Wikipedia said: "It was among the five worst financial crises the world had experienced and led to a loss of more than $2 trillion from the global economy." So, on the one hand, there are people that get caught and convicted after the fact. But that costly crisis and several of the others might have been avoided or diminished had regulators and public officials properly done their jobs.

As the teaser summary for Chasing Madoff explained above, Whistleblowers like Harry Markopolos are not only necessary, but sadly, they must also often be persistent. It said it was a decade before they finally broke through.

According to left-leaning ABC News: "Four years before Lehman Brothers collapsed and set off the worst U.S. financial disaster since the Great Depression, Ruhi Maker warned top officials at the Federal Reserve that the nation's housing bubble could wreak "enormous" economic damage."

According to right-leaning Forbes: "There were, in fact, many warnings dating back more than seven years--but in the euphoria of rising home prices, no one listened."

From the left and right sides of televised media are the following from CBS and Fox News.

Note that the screen-still above is dated 9.10.2003. Had public officials acted then, much of the pain of the financial crisis could have been avoided. Tens of millions of Americans, not to mention others around the world, suffered the loss of their home's equity, harms to their credit, and an array of harms that may be occasionally mentioned by media, but perhaps not with a key lesson to be learned. What happened before can happen again. What happened before, in the sense of a major scandal, may be happening now in the affordable housing crisis.

https://patch.com/florida/lake...

It can't be said enough. We live in an information age. But somehow, key pieces of information are somehow missed. Millions work in the government at the local, state, and federal levels. Tens of thousands of souls work in the corporate media. How is it possible that often such massive scandals can grow until the scam is finally revealed?

Part of the answer is revealed in the Madoff and other scandals. Often thousands of people may believe that they are benefiting from the status quo. Sometimes, they are not willing to rock the boat.

Re-read the post on WND shared above, because it provides a snapshot of how problematic the system can be. When you or someone you know sees something, in the most prudent way possible a person with knowledge and evidence should say something to some party willing to expose it. A good tip is to organize the evidence with an much documentation as you can and then create a written narrative that can help someone else make sense of the documents.

Can we fix what has been going wrong in our society? I'm hopeful. I wouldn't bother writing these columns if I thought this was hopeless. There are, in my mind, more people of good will than people of ill will. But there has to be action that follows insights. One of those actions is to vote wisely. See the linked articles to learn more. ##

https://patch.com/florida/lake...

https://patch.com/florida/lake...

https://patch.com/florida/lake...

> A Brief History of Labor Day and Modern Insights for Employees and Pay

L. A. "Tony" Kovach, multiple award winner in history, including the coveted Lottinville Award from the University of Oklahoma as a freshman. I'm keen on affordable housing, among other issues. We live in Winter Haven FL.

> Orlando RE Agent Smith-Younger Adults Will Need $8500 Monthly for Rent
> Blankley-Goodbye American Dream? Only 10% Polled Can Buy a House; But
> Waiting for Fed Rate Cut Before Buying a Home? Experts Say Think Twice
> Frank Rolfe-Special Interests ‘Don’t Want to Solve Affordable Housing'

> Renting? Rent too High? Odds Are DOJ Suit vs RealPage Matters to You
> New-Certified “Half Price Homes” - Affordable Housing Solution Redux
> Solution: “Would-Be Homebuyers Need 80% More Income Than 4 Years Ago”