Madoff--Blessed Are The Cynics

Madoff goes to jail for 150 years. Since he’s a little older than I am, he probably won’t live that long. Sentencing requirements demand that he serve 80% of the sentence. Just incidentally, no matter how long he sits in jail, it isn’t going to get anybody’s money back.
What, it seems to me, was needed ten and even twenty years ago was a little more healthy cynicism. Everybody loves an optimist—and Mr. Madoff was an optimist! Nobody likes a pessimist, especially not optimistic souls who trust their money to people like Madoff.
Wasn’t there one little kid in the crowd who took a good look and decided, out loud, that the emperor really didn’t have any clothes on? (Did the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who ruined the whole parade by pointing out the obvious spend the rest of his life under a cloud of opprobrium for being such a “nay sayer”?)
We hold the Prophet Jeremiah and Cassandra, princess of Troy, in low esteem because they brought incessant messages of gloom and doom. Nobody seems to reflect on the fact that—whatever else can be said of them—they were correct. Both Troy and Jerusalem fell to their enemies—exactly as Jeremiah and Cassandra predicted.
Would we esteem them more if they had gone around prattling optimistic twaddle as the Babylonians threw up siege works or as the Trojans tore down their walls to bring the wooden horse inside? It might seem that the reason pessimists are so much disdained is that, all too often, they are perfectly correct in their analyses.
Some fools need to be told NO, or DON’T or simply THAT WON’T WORK. Or even THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE. Was there no one wise enough in the ways of investment to realize the Madoff’s miraculous track record wasn’t possible?
Was there no one who, after spending a night with fellow investment bankers chatting or playing poker—no one who began to ask himself, “Where does Madoff do his investing?” If not at this and that bank or these or those brokerages, where does he invest?
There was no one who, in the interest of his own cash—or simply out of morbid curiosity, got on the phone and made fifteen to twenty phone calls? If he had, might he not have concluded that something was wrong here? That something wasn’t real?
Or, if you had enough invested with Madoff, would it hurt to press him—as hard as necessary—to find out exactly where and how he was making all this money in returns? (What’s the worst that could have happened—he might have given you your money back?)
Ten years of spectacular success—implausible success—which resulted in so much scraping and bowing, didn’t that make somebody say, “Wait a minute, that just doesn’t happen”?
(The other day I got an offer in the mail. It came with a $995 check that looked perfectly real. If I would deposit the money in my bank, then I could keep $100 for myself and $15 for expenses, if only I would test out a shipping service by sending a money order for $800 to an address in Canada.
How many optimists do you suppose did just that? My wife, who—God bless her—can be a good bit of a cynic about such things, got on the internet to check for fraud. Oh yes, this was a recurrent scam. By the time the check for $995 bounced, the people in Canada would have pocketed the $880 and run.
The bank would have come after me for the $880 I spent on the money order and, oh what fun.)
Didn’t anybody check anybody, anywhere about Bernie Madoff? Or would that have seemed just too déclassé? I suppose a few million is a small price to pay for having kept your good manners. And what’s a few million dollars if you’ve maintained your optimist outlook?
The Bible says that Christ did not trust people because he knew what people were really like. Think how much money could be saved by merely following Christ in this instance.
Very possibly some people who just read the last paragraph are thinking, “What a cynic”.
How much would the victims who stood up in court before Madoff was sentenced today and actually wept over their losses—how much would they trade now for a touch more cynicism back then?