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Bernie Madoff Scandal Essay

630 Words3 Pages

In the Bernie Madoff scandal, the most impressive fact was how constituents didn’t realize that he was running a ponzi scheme. The returns of 1-2% per month without any downfalls were unrealistic, but investors refused to even consider that it might be something unethical about this investment. Every investor was getting his share of returns and that was all that they wanted to know, besides Madoff was a respected Wall Street name, that found a secret formula for his hedge fund. In 2000, mathematician Harry Markopolos uncovered Bernie Madoff 65B ponzi scheme. For years he blow the whistle and tried to alert the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) about the fraud, but he was ignored by everybody. Many thought that Markopolos had some sort of financial interest and they ignored his findings. Markopolos put his life and career on the line to stand by what was right, stand by his ethical values. As he stated "If you're a whistleblower, you need to be eccentric. You have to have a firm belief in your core values and you have to be willing to risk it all to do what's right." (The Guardian) …show more content…

At that point Harry realized that something was wrong about Madoff security fund. Mathematically it was impossible to offer that kind of returns. As Markopolos stated "If there's only $1B of options in existence and he's many times that size, unless you could change the laws of mathematics, I knew I had to be right. And the risk-return ratios had never been seen in human recorded history. They were off the charts." (The Guardian). Harry used the Mosaic Theory to assemble his

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