Where's The Money, Bernie?

Where did the fifty billion dollars go? Clearly Bernard Madoff doesn't have it. So where is it? No professional market maker trades so badly that all that is left from a fifty billion dollar fund is a measly two or three hundred million dollars. How does one senior citizen manage to plausibly claim sole responsibility for the fleecing of such an enormously endowed hedge fund? It's like claiming one has singlehandedly halted the path of a herd of rogue elephants by waving one's arms wildly and making loud noises. It's ludicrous on the face. But speculating on the actual nature of Mr. Madoff's criminal enterprise isn't precisely what I am after today. No, despite the fact that this particular hedge fund collapse makes me ponder the possibility that we are looking at a case akin to the infamous CIA front, Bank of Commerce and Credit International, I am more interested in simply passing along my view that sometime in the next few years, as the greatest financial (and possibly economic) debacle since the Industrial age began, subsides, we will, I hope, be treated to sordid insider accounts of the real activities of our spectacularly successful kleptocracy.

As a student of history, I doubt seriously the enormous corruption that underlies our present desperate circumstances has ever been equalled, let alone surpassed. After all, when so much corruption occurs in broad daylight, (the list of crimes committed in full view of the public is almost too long to recount, including the savaging of just about every Bill in the original ten Bill of Rights) then the crimes committed out of sight of prying eyes and interested minds must be as unfathomable as the means by which one old man managed to lose fifty billion dollars all by himself.