Trailer for the documentary series "Madoff: The Monster from Wall Street" (Netflix)
"The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, in the absence of another definition, is a good thing. Greed is a right thing, greed works. Greed explains things, breaks in and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit."
Anyone who watched "Wall Street" well remembers the Greed is Good speech of the evil stock tycoon Gordon Gekko, a role that earned Michael Douglas an Academy Award.
But what this film did was much more than an unforgettable performance: it presented, in the most prominent way up to that time, the dark side of the stock market traders in the US - people who will do anything, but everything, for money.
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The American stock market is the spearhead of capitalism.
According to her, she is the compass and conscience of the Americans.
If we were now in an election year, count on Joe Biden crashing in the polls and then in the election itself.
Demanding and greedy institutions like Wall Street produce extreme and dangerous people.
One of them was Bernie Madoff, the biggest financial swindler to walk the planet and the man who ruined the lives of quite a few people, some of whom are still trying, almost 15 years later, to recover.
Most of them will experience the trauma for the rest of their lives, even though a victims' fund was established to which most of the money was returned in recent years.
Netflix's "Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street" is a four-part docu-series that sheds information, known and new, on the work of the financial man (officially, he was not an investment advisor for most of his life) who succeeded in defrauding Wall Street time and time again.
In the 1960s, the young Jewish man wanted to prove to his demanding father that he was capable of success.
He could not accept failure, and began to build a lie that lasted for almost a thousand years.
"You think you know the story, but you don't," notes an anonymous narrator at the opening.
At least in the first episode the impression was that he was wrong.
There was nothing in this prologue that we didn't know, that hadn't been mined since the affair broke in 2008.
The following parts already presented other layers, ones that shed more light and covered the statement - it is indeed a much bigger story than we knew.
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Really a monster?
Bernie Madoff (Photo: Reuters)
It is not certain that this was the intention of the director Joe Berlinger, but the discussion of the series starts with its title - "Madoff: The Monster from Wall Street".
A few months before, the series "Monster: The Story of Jeffrey Dahmer" appeared on Netflix.
Can the two really be compared?
Does a rogue, however great he may be, deserve the same extreme appellation as a loathsome cannibal?
Is a "financial killer" equal in value to a cold-blooded killer?
This is the doc's main problem and also its advantage - it tries to paint Madoff as a sociopath, but actually presents a much more complex picture of a man who helped build a system, and then that system turned him into its most extreme side effect.
As someone who always recognized the technological advance, Madoff advanced to become the chairman of Nasdaq. He was respected on Wall Street. So much respect, which allowed him to circus the Securities and Exchange Commission again and again with tricks that seemed to be taken from the book of Frank Abagnale, the famous con man from " catch Me If You Can".
Was Madoff really unscrupulous?
The series actually makes you doubt that.
He set up a huge Ponzi scheme, but did return funds to those who requested to withdraw.
Crooks use excuses, sometimes even disappear, but Madoff returned money to those who asked to leave.
There were even some who took profits (and had to return them as part of restitution to the victims).
As long as there was money in the register, the scam continued.
The collapse of the market in the subprime crisis - and not the Securities Authority that ignored the dozens of red flags before - led to the end of the game.
When Madoff couldn't pay the pyramid was exposed.
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An indictment against human nature.
Bernie Madoff (Photo: Reuters)
As in "The Money Machine", the book by Michael Lewis that was turned into a movie, here too there were those who said that the king was naked and no one listened to them.
Journalists investigated, newspapers deliberately ignored (according to the claim, the Wall Street Journal was one of the media outlets that turned their backs on the story).
Investment manager Harry Markopoulos kept alerting the Authority of his suspicions, but nothing was done.
Madoff is considered a monster and a financial killer for one simple reason - he couldn't keep up with the payments.
Had it not been for the subprime crisis, the scam would have continued.
It doesn't lessen his guilt, he should have rotted in prison until the day he died, which he did, but this dooku doesn't point the finger at him, or at least not only at him.
It is also a serious indictment against the American system and against human nature.
In the end, capitalism educates us all to be Gordon Gekko.
"My father invested all his money with Madoff. The dream of Jews like my father was to earn money, invest it and live on the interest," says one of the interviewees in the series.
Everyone dreamed of making money, they were quick to jump on the bandwagon.
Few asked what was happening, few understood what was happening.
On the one hand, Madoff used coercion to retain his clients.
"I can't check the books, I can't do due diligence, but if I tell my clients that I want to get out of the Madoff fund they will fire me," said one of the hedge fund managers who invested with him.
To that extent his influence on the investment world was great.
On the other hand, Madoff himself said, "My clients, with all their greed, did not want to stop the deals."
Why would they want to if they're making 8-15 percent a year for transactions allegedly made with their own funds?
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Is the world better off without him?
Not sure at all.
Bernie Madoff (Photo: Reuters)
Madoff died on April 14, 2021. Is the world better off without him?
Be sure not to.
The trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the crypto exchange FTX, who is accused of defrauding investors, will soon begin.
Markopoulos claimed in 2019 that "GE is a bigger fraud than Enron," referring to the energy giant that filed false reports, defrauded investors and employees, and went bankrupt at the turn of the millennium.
Every river where money flows is a haven for crooks, and that's even before we talked about the particularly bad year that passed on Wall Street, in which huge losses were recorded for legitimate investors.
It is not clear if and when another Madoff will emerge, but there are probably quite a few who act like him.
They just hope to win a different fate.
"Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street" is a docu that is not too harsh, but one that shows the ugly face of greed, and not just that of the biggest financial swindler known to mankind.
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