Case 25: Bernard Madoff (2008)

• Prof. Dr. Klaus Henselmann
• Dr. Stefan Hofmann

In December 2008, as the global financial crisis continued on its devastating course, a new scandal erupted. This scandal was not the work of speculators building complex financial products, of which buyers have little understanding, as was the case with the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. It was the result of one of the simplest and one of the oldest embezzling schemes: a Ponzi scheme. On December 11, 2008, Bernard L. Madoff, a trading powerbroker for over four decades and a Wall Street legend, was arrested by the FBI, accused of the largest investor swindle ever blamed on a single individual. A senior enforcement official at the SEC described Madoff’s scheme as “a stunning fraud that appears to be of epic proportions”, and the Economist called it “the con of the century”. Needless to say, the unprecedented scope of the fraud was far beyond the reach of all of the other recent scandals of the financial system.

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