Madoff Wishes SEC Had Caught Him Years Ago

(NEWSER) - The SEC's inspector general says the agency had plenty of chances to take down Bernie Madoff and whiffed on every one, Bloomberg reports. In a report released today, H. David Kotz writes that the SEC received "detailed and substantive complaints over the years to warrant a thorough and comprehensive examination” of Madoff. And yet it never performed a "competent investigation or examination." More»

SEC official quashed Stanford probe then sought to represent him

(NEWSER) - The SEC in April faced the release of a report slamming it for bungling an alleged Ponzi scheme. So what's a watchdog to do? Sue Goldman Sachs the same day, the agency's own internal watchdog told a Senate committee yesterday. Inspector-general H. David Kotz said it "would strain credulity to think it was coincidental," the Wall Street Journal reports. More»

Young, inexperienced investigators awed, missed signs of Ponzi scheme

(NEWSER) - Bernie Madoff got nervous every time SEC investigators came around, but he shouldn't have: A new book claims the regulators were so green they were awestruck by Madoff—and even asked about job openings and dropped off resumes, the New York Post reports. “They’d send kids. I think it was their first job out of school,” a secretary for the firm tells Andrew Kirtzman in his book, Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff. More»

Embarrassed committee gets aggressive with enforcement

(NEWSER) - Haunted by the failure to catch Bernie Madoff, the Securities and Exchange Commission is dramatically stepping up its investigation workload, reports the LA Times. Since February, the SEC has frozen the assets of 27 fraud suspects, compared to seven in the same period last year. “The clear message from the commission is we should be acting quickly where investor funds may be at risk from an ongoing fraud,” says the LA office head. More»

(NEWSER) - As dastardly as Bernard Madoff’s scam was, it’s hard not to pin some blame on the victims themselves, Joe Nocera writes in the New York Times. They shouldn’t have put all their eggs in one basket, no matter how promising it seemed: “Diversification has many virtues; one of them is that you won’t lose everything if one of your money managers turns out to be a crook.” More»