Many Mini Madoffs

Bernie Madoff gave a self-serving, fiction-filled interview aired today to a FOX Network business reporter. Madoff said his behavior was common practice on Wall Street. As I said in my recent column "World's Crookedest Casino", I fear on this one aspect, Madoff may be right. With a number of other fraudsters, scammers, and pyramid schemers uncovered such as Enron and other Ponzi brokers being ferreted out, one worries how many others may still be operating freely with regulators as incompetent or corrupt as they were in the Madoff case. Some might even contend that Social Security itself is a giant Ponzi scheme. In any event, you may not earn any interest stuffing your money in a mattress or garner rich dividends but at least it will not vanish into the ether there or into one of the con man's coffers.