Madoff: Le monstre de la finance

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.

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).

...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.

What is not excellent and what was used to really sell this documentary as new info, is the salacious and absolutely unproven allegation that Madoff was using organized crime and drug cartel money. The only evidence of this they offer is that Madoff parked money in the Cayman Islands, which even the documentary admitted, so do millions of legitimate investors. The evidence against him using funds from criminal enterprises, however, is overwhelming and ignored. If he were using such funds he would never have had the cash shortfalls he experienced. OG and drug cartel monies are not subject to the vagaries of the markets. Hence, when the market crash came in 2008, Bernie would have been sitting pretty with his OC money. Lastly, if Madoff had been fronting OC money and that yappy dog, Harry Markopolos, was threatening to expose and end the scheme, he would have woken up dead!

Otherwise, it was an excellent retelling of the Madoff tale and underscores how good and accurate the Robert De Niro/ Michelle Pfeiffer 'Wizard of Lies' was.

I am becoming a CFE. Certified Fraud Examiner. There were things I was not aware of that Madoff did. I watched Wizard Of Lies and they left out some things I wish they would have put in. This documentary did a lot of justice and more insights than anything else I have seen. I really liked the depositions from Madoff himself. I have not seen any of these until now. I also enjoyed how real life Madoff employees gave their insights on what it was like to work with Madoff. Again, really enjoyed this documentary. I still hate how he defrauded all of these people and in turn, he called his "clients" Greedy!! What a scum-bag.