Madoff 150 year sentence, to long or to short????

[TheGooner]

Madoff is guilty of fraud and convicted as such. But 150 years - other than satisfying a witch hunt and generating a headline seems to be a complete lack of proportion - which relates to the poll question too long or too short.

Having said that it appears that there have been several sentences for over 300 years for financial fraud in the past decade!

It's a moot point - he's an old man (71 I think) who will not live long inside anyway. But if sentences are the guideline then apparently there have been several worse cases in the last 10 years ?

I'm not saying the fallout is not awful, but to label Madoff as responsible for people's suicides is to take away the ability of the investors for self determination and reasoned descisions. And it's a step beyond what the Supreme Court was prepared to do.

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Regarding IGNORANT :

The investors who put every cent into a scheme that was over-achieving every other fund (as it turns out via a ponzi scheme) and a scheme that had been the subject of much speculation and warnings with many investors pulling out already - were IGNORANT.

Ignorant is not a simile for stupid - you can't mix the words and I did not use it - ignorant means that literally were lacking knowledge.

To make Madoff a one-off evil man is to misrepresent the truth behind financial investments, and people with money need to heed the lessons there and realise that it can happen and will happen again.

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Finally :

Ask the shareholders of Bear Sterns who were eventually paid $2 for their shares worth $120 just three months previously by JP Morgain - only when the federal govenrnment backed $30billion of worthless Bear Sterns assets. That's nearly 3 times the money gone overnight!!

Where are the trials and recriminations here? None !
Bernanke and his cronies have political friends - Madoff is a fraud but he was an easy target.

[AussieDave]

FFS

I'll have to get out more...but what's FFS?


Cheers

Dave

[TheGooner]

FFS = For Ducks Sake

(Except the second word only sounds like Duck and starts with an F)

[MichaelCorfman]

Well, from what I've read the actual losses as compared with total funds deposited by investors is a bit more than $10,000,000,000. 150 years is 54,750 days. That works out to be $182,648.40 per day, even in the rather unlikely scenario that he serves the entire sentence.

How many folks do you know that would be willing to spend a few days in jail if it was in exchange for that much money each day?

The other way of looking at it is that there were about 4,800 clients that were defrauded. So his sentence boils down to about 11 1/2 days per defrauded client. And the average client lost something like two million dollars.

Personally, I view what happened here as not being comparable in any way to being sentenced for a murder. Murder is far worse than defrauding someone of two million dollars. But then he was also being sentenced for nearly five thousand instances of such fraud.

Michael

[Betpartners]

Well i certainly do not want to get in to a war of words with The Gooner or anyone over this, we will have enough time for that as soon as the footy season starts.

What i will say is that i think we can all agree that he did deserve a stiff sentence and see his days out in prison.

I think its the number 150 years that gets people, i am sure if it was 30 years without parole then most would be satisfied.

[TheGooner]

we will have enough time for that as soon as the footy season starts

That we will mate ...

Still 40 days away though ...

[Shaun O'neill]

Michael

You can look at this in another way Madoff has killed so many charties due to his fraud I feel that the term is right but still not justice.

Shaun

Well, from what I've read the actual losses as compared with total funds deposited by investors is a bit more than $10,000,000,000. 150 years is 54,750 days. That works out to be $182,648.40 per day, even in the rather unlikely scenario that he serves the entire sentence.

How many folks do you know that would be willing to spend a few days in jail if it was in exchange for that much money each day?

The other way of looking at it is that there were about 4,800 clients that were defrauded. So his sentence boils down to about 11 1/2 days per defrauded client. And the average client lost something like two million dollars.

Personally, I view what happened here as not being comparable in any way to being sentenced for a murder. Murder is far worse than defrauding someone of two million dollars. But then he was also being sentenced for nearly five thousand instances of such fraud.

Michael

[XoomBingo]

The Judge wanted to send a very strong message and convey that anybody who wants to invest money on behalf of others has a huge responsibility.
In my opinion as long as his message stays in the mind of people and prevents further frauds, it helps.

[Shaun O'neill]

Its kind of weird I bought the Madoff book a few weeks ago way prior to him going down, the guy was very clever i do think it just became to much for him to carry on his shoulders.


He could have just fled the US with the money but he wanted to confess, you will seem many more of these frauds in the future.

Crazy stuff.

Shaun