Asset Planning, Inc Blog
Madoff Madness
How did Bernie Madoff mastermind a Ponzi scheme for so long and make fifty billion dollars disappear? How was he able to hide these losses from SEC regulators and his clients? How does a former NASDAQ chairman do this and hide it for so long from the regulators? How do people know if their investments are safe?
A custodian is the firm that actually holds your securities, cash, bonds, and mutual funds. Mr Madoff's firm was his own custodian. To open an account with him, you made your check out to Bernard Madoff Investment Securities. He allegedly had four sets of books- actually, the man must be exhausted from the moving of money on paper that he did. He made fake statements and falsified the account values on the monthly statements that were sent to his clients. Since the custodian and the money manager were one and the same, the clients had no way of knowing if their account values were correct. There were no third parties involved to catch him. His auditor was not one of the big accounting firms. His niece is married to an SEC auditor. He ran a hedge fund and the government does not regulate hedge funds. There was a lot of movement to get hedge funds to register with the SEC a year ago and the hedge funds won. They stayed unregulated.
If Mr Madoff never deposited the client monies into an account that was insured by SIPC or FDIC, his clients do not have insurance to fall back on. That would only make matters worse.
We use an outside custodian such as TD Ameritrade and Schwab to hold our clients investments. Asset Planning does not take custody of assets- meaning, we cannot ever hold securities on our own. We do not invest, nor have we ever, invested in hedge funds.
When a situation does not have transparency, there is cause for concern. Mr Madoff ran his hedge fund on a separate floor in a locked room where only three people had access. This is where the algorithms were running the money in a black box. No one understood what they were investing in, yet continued to pour millions of dollars into his scheme. The investors were let down by Mr Madoff and by the SEC, who was supposed to protect them from fraud like this.
Sandy
