Madoff: Le monstre de la finance

Featuring slow-motion actor re-enactments, the New York Stock Exchange-style display graphics scrolling along the bottom of the screen, and obligatory views of hysterical brokers on the trading floor, it's all really interesting. But I believe that I've had enough of being entertained by the real atrocities of unrepentant guys. At least Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street offers the victims of white collar crimes whose stories are frequently ignored a voice. This series shed light on atrocities that take place in Wall Street and how it is constantly ignored even though multiple red flags. Pity all the victims involved.

For anybody who just heard faint echoes about the "Madoff monster" this documentary provides a good insight into his crimes. However, starting with weak points first, it suffers from a severe case of Netflexite, aka that annoying device of starting somewhere mid-point of a story and working its way back and forward quite randomly.

Second, we never get any info about what happened to the Security & Exchange Commission's inspectors who "failed" to inspect or to the SEC at large, the "commission" that showed only gross incompetence or even collusion with the monster.

The story starts with Madoff arrest on 11 Dec. 2008, the terrible year of the great crisis and works its way back to Madoff's birth, youth, marriage to Ruth and origins of his firm, with excruciatingly boring details. There are many interviews with employees from the legit Madoff operations and none from the illegal - no surprise there.

There are also many re-enactment, of which at least half is superfluous. In short, Madoff run his illegal scheme from the 17th floor of the Lipstick building and the legal from the 19th. Employees from the 19th were forbidden entrance to the 17th and even Mark and Andrew, Bernie's son were not allowed. But even if this would be considered at least bizarre and worth exploring, nobody did anything for decades.

Some external connections started sniffing around Madoff as far back as 1992, when his name was mentioned to the SEC. Since then, there were six investigations on Madoff, all botched.

At this stage I would have like to watch a documentary about SEC and what happened to those "inspectors" - I guess nothing, but still...

Four episodes about this complex yet easy fraud are long to digest and the tragic ending comes none too soon, with Mark committing suicide, Andrew dying of cancer, Ruth being destitute and Bernie dying in the slammer, also none too soon. A tighter editing and less flourishing would have helped.

...Or how to lose 19 billion dollars...of other people's money. Bernie Madoff was indeed the monster of the title here, an ambitious, ruthless individual who found that the best way to not just personal fortune and fame but also tacit acceptance within Wall Street, was to create the world's biggest ever Ponzi Scheme, which basically as I understand it means taking other people's money without ever investing it, instead hoarding it and paying out withdrawal requests from this ever-growing stockpile of cash. Using secretive and in truth wholly rudimentary methods to report to his "clients", once he had everyone thinking he was the emperor, it took the market-shattering financial crash of 2008 to finally strip the charlatan of his credibility and finally expose him as the fraudster he was.

Netflix showed this rags-to-riches-back-to-rags saga over 4 episodes outlining Madoff's inexorable rise through Wall Street before the bubble burst in 2008 and his house of cards came crashing down. The story of course is as fascinating as it is cautionary, with almost every one of the human victims, not to mention the representatives of major financial institutions, being shown as having been completely blindsided by the apparently gravity-defying returns promised by Madoff to his exclusive but gullible not to mention greedy clients.

The series charts his express progress to the top and all the professional and luxurious accoutrements that went with it. With contributions from on the one hand, many of his office staff and actual video footage from Madoff's own depositions from inside prison, but notably not a word from any of his surviving family or even his second-in-command, as well as insights from financial journalists and investigators, including the young accountant at a rival who openly and early on called the sham for what it was, this was a darkly fascinating tale of greed and abuse of power on Wall Street. Almost as culpable you'd have to say, were the financial regulator of the New York Stock Exchange and the ratings agencies who throughout the whole affair completely missed the obvious with their laissez-faire policies coming home to roost with the ruin of many unsuspecting investors, including the French representative of one major investment fund who committed suicide days after the scandal broke.

My only complaint about this series is that it could perhaps have been edited down to a more manageable length plus I'm not a fan of the apparently new documentary technique of having lookalike-actors recreating actual events, especially here with far too much repetition of set-scenes - how many times did we have to watch "Madoff" strolling through his office in slow-motion?

Regardless of which, this documentary series held the attention of my wife and I throughout and even ended with a chilling statement that there may be other similar scandals awaiting discovery and that Madoff's fraud may not in fact be the biggest of them all, as it currently is.

Bernie Madoff perpetrated one of the greatest frauds in history, but also one of the simplest: he simply pretended to have bought low and sold high, and with great reported profits nobody asked for their money back, at least not until the stock market crashed in 2008. This series describes him an a "monster", but I find it hard to hate him as much as the tech frauds: at least he wasn't claiming he could save the world. What's interesting is his ordinary origins (he was New York Jewish middle class, his right-hand man was Italian-American), and the sense to which the scam depended on affinity fraud (selling to people from his own background); the contrast with the Europeans he conned, old-money banking aristocracy, is striking. There are many remarkable details of this story, but like many Netflix documentaries it's slightly too long, with too many people commenting without adding that much information; no-one willing to confess to being aware of the fraud gives an interview (although there is film of Bernie himself claiming all responsibility).

Detailed, interesting and exposing, the docu-series intricatly scrutinises much of the key apsects of Madoff ponzi scheme in which he was able to steal money for decades.

My only qualm with these sort of documentaries is that they work almost like a distraction from what's going on in other places. "Don't look over there, look over here!" Like, there was a documentary that came out about the crash of 2008 in which all the contributing perpetuators like George Bush appeared in the documentary to absolve themselves of any wrongdoing and blame it on other factors instead rather than the people making the decisions.

The titular person Madoff is referred to as "the monster of Wall Street", as if enormous fraud isn't cirrently business as usual on Wall Street, and that everything is as it should be after Bernie was arrested.

The documentary talks about the people who suffered and lost as a result, but make no mention that it's still perfectly fine on Wall Street to steal from poor people without any recompense. Bernie was arrested because he stole from rich people, which is the only crime on Wall Street that gets taken seriously. If all the hedge funds, financial advisory firms and brokerages and market makers who are currently breaking the law carte blanche to steal from low income and retail investors were to be arrested, Wall Street would become a skeleton of its former self. A ghost town. Yet according to this docu-series Madoff was the big boss to take down. The evil monster like no other.

The series is good and informatice but I still hope people realise that Madoff was the fall guy for Wall Street theft to continue, and that taking him out did nothing to help the little guy from being crushed under the boot of government and financial sector corruption.