Subscribe to Dollars & Sense magazine. Recent articles related to the financial crisis. A Bit More on Madoff and WieselIn my earlier post expanding on Joe Nocera's column on Madoff's victims, I'd meant to include an excerpt from this article from a while back in the New Yorker. The article was compelling for going at least some of the way toward answering a question that many of us have asked ourselves, but maybe never expected to get an answer: Who falls for those Nigerian scam emails? I mean, if they keep sending them, the scammers must be finding victims. But who? The article profiles an ordained minister and Christian psychotherapist from the suburbs of Boston who got drawn in, and was victimized, by some Nigerian email scammers in a check fraud scheme—and was prosecuted for his role in the scheme. Part of the burden of the article—besides answering that question we thought no one ever would—is to assess the victim's culpability. He was victimized, but he did also participate in fraud. There's a paragraph early in the article that struck me, and that I've been thinking about in recent weeks as the Madoff victims have their say (including especially Elie Wiesel's public expressions of scorn and retributive sentiment for Madoff):Robert B. Reich, the former Labor Secretary, who has studied the psychology of market behavior, says, "American culture is uniquely prone to the 'too good to miss' fallacy. 'Opportunity' is our favorite word. What may seem reckless and feckless and hapless to people in many parts of the world seems a justifiable risk to Americans." But appetite for risk is only part of it. A mark must be willing to pursue a fortune of questionable origin. The mind-set was best explained by the linguist David W. Maurer in his classic 1940 book, "The Big Con": "As the lust for large and easy profits is fanned into a hot flame, the mark puts all his scruples behind him. He closes out his bank account, liquidates his property, borrows from his friends, embezzles from his employer or his clients. In the mad frenzy of cheating someone else, he is unaware of the fact that he is the real victim, carefully selected and fatted for the kill. Thus arises the trite but none the less sage maxim: 'You can't cheat an honest man.'" The whole article is definitely worth a read. Labels: Bernard Madoff, control fraud, Elie Wiesel, Greed, Nigerian Scam, Wall Street Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). Madoff's Accomplices: His Victims (Nocera)Finally, somebody in a mainstream publication says something close to what I have been thinking about the Madoff victims. In a column last Friday entitled Madoff Had Accomplices: His Victims, Joe Nocera argues that the investors whom Madoff cheated were irresponsible. As I will argue below, I think they were showed not just personal irresponsibility, but possibly also ethical and political irresponsibility. But here's Nocera:[J]ust about anybody who actually took the time to kick the tires of Mr. Madoff's operation tended to run in the other direction. James R. Hedges IV, who runs an advisory firm called LJH Global Investments, says that in 1997 he spent two hours asking Mr. Madoff basic questions about his operation. "The explanation of his strategy, the consistency of his returns, the way he withheld information—it was a very clear set of warning signs," said Mr. Hedges. When you look at the list of Madoff victims, it contains a lot of high-profile names—but almost no serious institutional investors or endowments. They insist on knowing the kind of information Mr. Madoff refused to supply. I like Nocero's line of thinking, but I wish he'd gone beyond personal investment advice. There is an argument to be made that Madoff's victims—or some of them, at least—and (it should be added) plenty of other big-money investors, are guilty not only of failing in their duties to themselves to invest their money wisely, but also failing ethically to invest their money in ways that don't harm other people. And if this is true of the Madoff investors, then it's true of a lot of other investors in Wall Street's latest high-flying phase. Take Elie Wiesel, for example. Here are some excerpts from the NY Times article about Wiesel's comments at the Portfolio forum Nocera mentions: Elie Wiesel Levels Scorn at Madoff And this:
Now, the punishment Wiesel describes sounds a lot like torture to me—solidary confinement alone is torture—so I was a little taken aback that Wiesel called for it. But what about a humanitarian and professor of ethics like Wiesel failing to look into the source of his and his foundation's investment profits? In the case of Madoff, the source was theft—Madoff and his accomplices used new investors' money to pay interest to older investors (this is what a Ponzi scheme is). But what if Madoff had just been a "good" (i.e., effective) money-manager (albeit with less consistently, and suspiciously, reliable returns), and had been paying Wiesel and his foundation interest that came from, say, companies that outsourced jobs to sweatshops; leveraged buyouts of companies that were then gutted and resold; companies that pollute; companies engaged in predatory lending; etc. etc.—that is to say, the usual sources of Wall Street megaprofits? Madoff was stealing from people, but many a money-manager who hasn't been branded "the most hated man in New York" (as one of the tabloids, I believe, put it), or called a "monster" on the cover of New York magazine has been complicit in plenty of human misery. Would Wiesel have known? Labels: Bernard Madoff, Elie Wiesel, financial crisis, Joe Nocera, Wall Street Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). |
