LOS ANGELES -- Historians say Ponzi schemes and con men are a fact of life. The best, the brightest and the richest can all become victims: from President Ulysses S. Grant in 1884 when the partners of his Wall Street firm left him penniless a year before he died of throat cancer to Bernard Madoff's investors, many whom became instantly penniless, just before Christmas and Hanukkah. Greed is a fact of life.
Thomas Friedman said it best in the N.Y. Times: "I have no sympathy for Madoff. But the fact is, his alleged Ponzi scheme was only slightly more outrageous than the 'legal' scheme that Wall Street was running, fueled by cheap credit, low standards and high greed.
"What do you call giving a worker who makes only $14,000 a year a nothing-down and nothing-to-pay-for-two-years mortgage to buy a $750,000 home, and then bundling that mortgage with 100 others into bonds, which Moody's or Standard & Poor's rate AAA, and then selling them to banks and pension funds the world over? That is what our financial industry was doing. If that isn't a pyramid scheme, what is?"
Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse along comes Madoff, the new poster boy for everything that's happened to the America's soul the past eight years: greed, arrogance, stupidity and megalomania.
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