You say "missed", I say "ignored". Probably most accurate to preface that adjective with the adverb "intentionally"...

I think in no small part Madoff got away with no serious inquiries into his firm because he was, after all, a past president of NASDAQ.

If only he had been watched as carefully a Martha Stewart.

What's interesting is to reflect back to the last 8 go-go years where the repugs held the Executive and the legislative for the first six. All they were concerned with was people become shareholders of wealth in the economy ... it didn't matter how. Thus, all the barriers were remove to facilitate the ramp up for individual investment on a scale unknown.

So were does the blame fall? On the consumer who was egged on to invest for the greater good, or the government side for removing barriers to protect investors from corporate greed that tends to bleed the investor to death?

While I understand the conservative view point, however, I disagree with their methodology ... welcome to their worldly view. Unfortunately, the elected representatives in both House and Senate are all hell-bent on destroying what the Democrats are trying to nurture back to health. They don't realize the public interest trumps the Party interest .

The federal government needs to have specific parts free from legislative and executive branch interference in order to protect the monetary self-interest of the public. Our retirement and personal investments should be hands-off to legislative and executive machinations. As personal investors, we need to trust the people and institution we put our money into and we need the government to be the watch-dog to make sure our interests are protected to the full extent of the law. Unfortunately, the reverse has been true ... the people and institutions are protected by the legislation and executive while the public has been fleeced.

I have a suspicion that many who invested with Madoff are the type who support "free market capitalism" and are of the mind that "Government is the problem".

Words to go bankrupt by:

'Get Government out of the way and let the markets work!'

Is this man's actions not justification for capital punishment? I'm serious. In China they would march this man out to a field and have a soldier shoot him in the back of the head with his rifle. And it wouldn't take much longer than a trial and sentencing.

This man stole $50 Billion dollars. His actions alone damaged the national economy. If he is guilty of this fraud he should be severely punished. And the fact that he won't be, nor will any of the other Wall Street fraudsters, is the principal reason why our economy is faltering from "lack of confidence". IOW: their 'confidence game' has destroyed confidence in the entire market.

I think that's worth executing the man for.

I think it's interesting that every Ponzi scheme has a "McGuffin," a thing at the center of the scheme that takes the center of attention but really is just a meaningless diversion. Madoff's McGuffin was his "Secret Sauce" black-box algorithm (which didn't, apparently, even exist). But what was really driving the scheme was the ever-increasing pool of new investors and new capital. When that stopped increasing (and, worse, people tried to take their money out), the scheme collapsed.

In the subprime mess as a whole, all the funny money, the insane leveraging, the bullshit derivatives, the bonuses, all depended, not on some new theory of the market, but on one simple ridiculous, unsupported assumption -- that real estate would always go up in price, thereby papering over all the leveraging and looniness. It was essentially a perpetual motion machine, a huge Ponzi scheme.

Why are so many of us leaving the same comment twice?

Make no mistake, when Cox was appointed this position it was abundantly clear he was put there for the purpose that there would be no important oversight done. Members of both the house and the senate republican party were all over tv saying he would be just terrific--why, because he would let the free markets work. They did not and now we are on the hook--the taxpayers.

Quite a few charities based in NY have been hurt including the Innocence Project which goes around the country DNA testing pre-DNA evidence cases and it's work has freed hundreds of wrongly convicted persons. This includes nearly 100 on DEATH ROW. What should we tell the other innocent prisoners? Hope we can get more donations before they inject you! This is a small example of the impacts of the crime on real people.