http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36681781/ns/po...ashington_post/

as they tell us to vote this and that at the expense of peoples health, pensions, etc. fing azzholes

This is why the Republicans vs Democrats argument doesn't work. One party is not better than the other because they're both the same.

We need more parties in this country BADLY.

we have them, the media just won't entertain them

True. Just wish they were more mainstream I mean or had the money to be.

Didn't want to start a new topic but I met someone recently that lost all their money to Madoff but was overall positive after 10 years. What the Government is doing here to people that lost their life savings is just plain wrong and downright immoral. The person I met is actually the daughter of the person that lost their money. Unknown to her is that her mother also put her name on the account. So the lawyers are coming after her as a result. They in effect are treating the folks that lost everything like criminals. Her mother had lived off the Madoff interest (roughly 50K a year for 9-10 years and re-invested any social security earnings she had back with Madoff) and was intending to transfer the principal to her daughter in her estate. Since the mother has nothing left the lawyers are coming after the daughter for the interest earned during that 10 year period (actually the last 7 years, as they are only going after money from 7 years out) Ironically the daughter invested $60K with Madoff a month before his ponzi scheme went public and lost that of course. Now they want the daughter to sell her house , essentially go bankrupt, and turn the money she realizes back in for re-distribution. So this daughter now looks at what was going to be a $500K + inheritance and financial security turn to her losing all her assets. And get this - they want the money returned pre-tax and are allowing no credit for income tax paid on the earnings. Apparently so much of what Madoff did was to old retired people and now it's their children that are getting affected if the parents put their names on the account. When I hear stories like this and then read about the Goldman scandal and how Wall street commits real crimes against society simply to earn billions in bonus money, it makes me sick. This story is really a shame. The daughter, who worked hard all her life (and who herself is now 60 years old, the mother is 85) now could lose everything she had simply because the mother, in an act that she thought would safeguard the asset, named her on the account. And the kicker is the Government is spending $27mln a quarter in legal fees to go after these people to bankrupt them even further than Madoff did. Amazing.

I agree about the double standard going on. What I don't understand is why would anyone in their right mind put all their life saving into one basket and then also wondering why they're getting such huge returns on their profits. It seems like what you said ice the daughter didn't even know what her mother was doing and in return her mother could make her daughter have $0 to her name.

Agreed 100 percent. No one is going to legitimately give you double-digit returns every year. It's just not realistic. Every fund has a bad year from time to time and bear markets are going to give your portfolio some ups and downs. I don't understand how people (many of whom were very wealthy and influential) got caught up in Madoff's scheme. There were so many red flags. Even the SEC received multiple warnings about Madoff and did nothing. I guess they were too busy downloading porn, according to the story that broke a couple of days ago.

This is why I think anyone that gets subject to a clawback has a heck of a defense. The SEC was warned several times, and did nothing. In fact one warning made it clear that Madoff would have needed to own virtually every share of every stock traded on all the exchanges in the world to pull off some of the moves he said he accomplished. That should have made someone at the SEC's hir stand up. If the police and judge of Wall Street missed it, and with a lot of power to do something about it, or at a minimum put out a low key warning about what to look for in ponzi scemes (without even mentioning Madoff's name) then how do you go back and blame folks that thought they were legitamately investing. A second strong defense is that 90-95% of Madoffs promisd returns were not outlandish. They were double digit, but barely as most were 10%. Remmber in some of these years the stock market had 30% returns.

I asked the question about how could anyone think a steady flow return like Madoff's represented legit investments. The answer was in fact that they viewed it as a super CD, safer than stock investing and without the level of returns in the stock market and of course the person noted that in many years, most in fact, returns published by mutual funds alone (not to mention hedge funds and the housing market etc) were superior. The person also saw statements that showed the false trades, hence they never questioned anything.

The funny thing here is that I had these people (mother and daughter) over to my house back in summer of 2002 and the elder woman noted to me that she was getting a steady 8-10% return on an investment, no matter what Wall Street did. Given this was after the collapse following 9/11, I had a very hard time accepting this. Madoff did lower the amounts in bad Wall Street years by a few percentage points, telling his clients that he had to guarantee lower rates because of a poor market and more conservative investments. I said to her at the time that no one could be net positive every year, let alone guarantee a net positive rate, especially between 8-12%. I just told the woman d'ont put a lot in that investment as it smelled fishy to me. My thought though was not ponzi scheme, but a dirty investor, like Paulson, who duped Goldman into doing the trading that got them sued by the SEC. Unfortunately, she did indeed put everything with Madoff, and put her daughters name on the account.

isn't greed grand?!?! when stupidity mixes with greed, thats the biggest losers.