Bernard Madoff is a master of the confidence strategy. Confidence, after all, is what one needs to give his financial adviser and investment manager, when parting with hard-earned money for lots more interest. A lot more than confidence is what you’re bound to lose if your financial adviser duped you. Bernard Madoff’s recently huge scam with loses of $50bn is evidence, indeed, that money corrupts – and it is able to do that if the ground is fertile with greed on all sides.

Madoff has had some high-profile and high-flying clientele. 50 billion USD only shows that he had been trusted. Now, he is most hated. Like the housing and mortgage subprime crisis that hit the likes of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, it is now apparent to the ordinary investor that some people play the role of middleman a.k.a. investment manager or financial adviser and makes a hefty profit out of the investment with nothing more than saliva and talk as personal investment. This talk can be so sweet and promising that one can easily believe that it’s very good. But what is too good to be true is essentially untrue, as Madoff’s clients are now finding out.

Madoff had enough credentials for credibility. He used to run NASDAQ. He has also been in the investment business for nearly half a century. But in 30 out of those nearly 50 years in his business, he has already been scamming people. He brilliantly made people believe that their money was earning a huge fortune. What he did was use money from new investors to fund the withdrawals of the earlier investors. He played them around.

Of course, Madoff is only the newest poster boy of the corruption of the US financial markets. He is living proof that hypercapitalism is bound to fail, sooner than later. He is simply a corrupt player in an absolutely corrupt playground.

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Via Times Online