How Many Madoffs Are Out There?

Barely two months have passed since mega financier Bernard Madoff became a household name, having ripped off, mostly, seriously rich investors to the tune of $50 billion dollars, and we now have suspect #2, billionaire R. Allen Stanford, of Stanford Financial Group, being sued by the SEC for an $8 billion dollar fraud perpetrated on his well heeled investors, not to mention allegations of money laundering and bribery. Unlike Madoff, electronically bound to the drudgery of his sumptuous Upper East Side penthouse, while awaiting trial, Mr. Stanford is nowhere to be found. And unlike Madoff, Stanford was a very busy political contributor, having lavished vast sums of money on both political parties as well as various lobbyists over the years.

The commonality between the two men was the promise of impossibly handsome returns on investments. The rich and powerful flocked to these hucksters' high-falutin Ponzi schemes with their Bush tax cuts, for personal enrichment, rather than the job creation promised to the country by a political party devoid of any sense of morality, equity or fairness.

With the entire world financial system on the brink, the Madoffs, near and far, are being exposed. Add to these singular con artists, the Swiss bank, UBS, which has existed for years as the favored parking garage for the greediest to dump fabulous amounts of wealth in lieu of taxation. Charged with defrauding the IRS, UBS, has agreed to cough up almost $1 Billion dollars to the US Treasury, and name names, as early as today. Wonder how many UBS account holders were fleeced by Madoff/Stanford? I suspect we'll see considerable overlap. And in the months ahead, enough Madoffs will likely surface to warrant their own special wing in one of our fantastic minimum security prisons.

And, finally, a few new jobs will be created to watch over the hucksters who, in truth, spent years doing everything humanly possible to prevent that from ever happening.