When Bernie Madoff was sentenced the other day for running a world-beating Ponzi scheme that defrauded people of millions of dollars, I didn't have much to say about it, or his 150 year sentence. ("They might as well sentence him to a million billion years," a friend observed.) But the more I consider it, the less important I think Madoff really is. I side with Joe Nocera on the subject of the victims; sympathy for their plight (and the plight of some of the important nonprofits that were ruined by the scheme) aside, the fact is that the performance of his fake fund really should have raised a lot of questions, and I don't have a ton of sympathy for the wealthy people participating in the fund who could afford lawyers and advisers to protect their money from this sort of thing (and should presumably know how to diversify their portfolios).
Meanwhile, we still haven't seen much in the way of prosecutions for pernicious actions that stripped wealth from people who couldn't afford to lose it and lacked the resources to protect it -- homeowners who saw their limited assets vanish thanks to predatory lending, people whose 401ks and pension funds have disappeared, etc. These broad-reaching prosaic losses are worth getting worked up about while the rare sensational crime holds attention; it's the broad, systematic failing of our financial system that's truly outrageous.
-- Tim Fernholz
