Word: madoff
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...didn't know it yet, but we had been playing in the Bernard Madoff Investment Securities LLC Fantasy Financial League. It began when we sold our home at the peak of the market, collected what was left from an old divorce, found other monies and then, with a combination of pleasure and trepidation, handed over our life savings to someone named Stanley Chais, the Los Angeles network organizer for a man named Bernard Madoff...
...surface, Madoff's funds were supposed to be low-risk investments. His largest fund reported steady returns, usually gaining a percentage point or two a month. The funds' stated strategy was to buy large cap stocks and supplement those investments with related stock-option strategies. The combined investments were supposed to generate stable returns and also cap losses...
...sometime in 2005, according to the SEC suit, Madoff's investment-advisory business morphed into a Ponzi scheme, taking new money from investors to pay off existing clients who wanted to cash out. According to a form filed with the SEC, Madoff reported that the business had $17.1 billion under management in January 2008. As the market got worse this year, Madoff continued to report to investors that his funds were up - as much as 5.6% through the end of November. That would have been a remarkable performance. During the same time, the stocks of the Standard & Poor...
Despite his gains, a growing number of investors began asking Madoff for their money back. In the first week of December, according to the SEC suit, Madoff told a senior executive that there had been requests from clients for $7 billion in redemptions. On Wednesday, Madoff met with his two sons to tell them the advisory business was a fraud - "a giant Ponzi scheme," he reportedly told them - and was nearly bankrupt. The sons reportedly contacted their lawyer, who then alerted federal authorities to the fraud. Before being caught, Madoff was working on a scheme to dole out his funds...
Many who know Madoff say they are surprised by the revelations. "Many of the assets he took were from friends and family," says a former Tremont official. "It is almost inexplicable. Even the people I have talked to who have had long relationships with him are shell-shocked...