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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Sentimental accounts of losses, very little teachings, March 27, 2009
This review is from: Catastrophe: The Story of Bernard L. Madoff, the Man Who Swindled the World (Paperback)
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Though just published, it is already out-of-date. The authors didn't have information on Madoff's guilty admission and spent several chapters discussing confess or trial. Additionally one-quarter of the book is difficult-to-read legal documents appendixes, making 2/5 of the book irrelevant as of 3/09.
If you were a Madoff customer, a Madoff-news-addict, or a person interested in Jewish charities, this book is well-written and clear.
If not one of the above, the book offers little that's practical or entertaining. If I were an investor, I would like to understand what the numerous Madoff red flags were--not detailed in this book. If I wanted to be entertained, I would want to read about how Madoff was so devious and calculating, and the spine-tingling risks he took. Neither of these are detailed here. Instead, it's a set of sentimental interviews about whom so and so lost so much money. Tells little about what they could do to prevent these.
Also, the author separates Jews from "gentiles", and focuses on Jews. I thought Madoff has broader appeal.... Affinity scams are well known in churches, for example. This book doesn't teach how affinity scams work in general.
Didn't learn much of value.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Thick on sentiment and thin on facts or analysis, April 12, 2009
This review is from: Catastrophe: The Story of Bernard L. Madoff, the Man Who Swindled the World (Paperback)
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The recent frauds allegedly perpetrated by Bernard Madoff, Tang Wei Zhen, Robert Allen Stanford, Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh, teach us about the importance of transparency of investment decision and management processes and provide a rich source of writing inspiration.
A typical investment fraud plays along Andersen's famous "Emperor's New Clothes" tale scenario, and it includes four key participants: swindlers, an exposing child, an ignorant and sycophant crowd, and victims. Strober's book hyperbolizes all four key components to a unique degree:
1. The main character is Bernard Madoff, a highly respected financier, previous NASDAQ chairman, and a member of multiple exclusive clubs. Since establishing his financial securities investment firm in 1960, he posted an uninterrupted record of outstanding financial performance, accumulated billions in assets under management, and frequently turned away investors only too eager to participate.
2. The cries about the naked emperor include Barron's article (2001) and Markopolos's letter to SEC (2005) that lists twenty nine (29) redflags.
3. The crowd is the regulatory bodies, other hedge fund managers, and the media that failed to notice and report the largest Ponzi scheme in human history in spite of suspicions and warnings.
4. The list of victims includes dozens of major banks, hedge funds, charities, and universities, as well as individual investors.
Having interviewed some 30 people, including classmates, investors, lawyers, and other Wall Street experts in a short time span during the few weeks since the news of Madoff's arrest on December 11, 2008, Strobers' book is necessarily limited to the few facts printed in the media and a few individual victims' perspectives. A detailed analysis or meaningful comparisons are impossible at this early time and even basic questions, such as the total amount of swindled money, the number of participants, and the actual damages to specific investors, remain unanswered. For me, the most interesting parts of the book turned out to be the Markopolos letter, published as an Appendix on page 191. On the other hand, some of the other chapters seem to be either too long and repetitive or outright irrelevant, like Chapter 7.
This book seems thick on sentiment and thin on facts or analysis. Perhaps the next edition will cover this gap.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
FIRST OFF THE BLOCK, May 2, 2009
This review is from: Catastrophe: The Story of Bernard L. Madoff, the Man Who Swindled the World (Paperback)
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The foreword to this book is dated precisely 32 days later than the original news story of the discovery of the Madoff scandal. That is eloquent testimony to the authors' objective - they felt the need for an immediate book on the subject. I have seen the objection raised that an immediate book of this kind cannot be the latest word on the story, but although that is undoubtedly true it is not much of a discovery. Nobody yet knows how many more chapters of this saga have still to unfold, and to me it is a good idea to collect the early disclosures as quickly as possible. Newspaper and broadcast reports are patchy and temporary by their nature, a book less so. Just as important to me as a reader is that in the hands of the right authors an early book can capture a lot of the sense of breathless rush (not to say outright panic in some quarters) that surrounded the Madoff disaster.
I am really quite impressed by the job the Strobers have done under the circumstances. The main sign of haste is that the book is slightly repetitious here and there, but not to any bothersome extent. Their narrative is clear and literate, and although there are plenty of quotations these are skilfully placed so as to provide variety, and they do not suggest padding. The authors make some attempt to account for the personality of Bernard Madoff, but the main focus is on the actual events. To me, this is the right way of doing it. The first need is clarity about what actually happened, so far as that can be ascertained early on in the saga, the actual sequence of events is exciting enough in its own right to constitute a sufficient narrative thread, and I actually doubt that we are ever going to improve greatly on the simple perception regarding Madoff that his nature was inherently criminal.
One respect in which I want to commend this book strongly is the way in which Deborah and Gerald Strober handle the delicate question of Madoff's Jewishness. I presume the authors are themselves Jewish, but what is categorical fact requiring no presumptions is that Madoff was active in numerous Jewish charities and other enterprises and associations, and that these were consequently among his victims who suffered most. The tone that the Strobers adopt is measured and rational, and to me as a gentile it seems absolutely exemplary. The issue cannot be avoided, so it should be handled without either embarrassment or posturing or over-reaction, and that is the way the thing is done here. They quote some comments, predictably anonymous, from blogs and chatrooms that are of an odiously anti-semitic nature, but they have more sense than to exaggerate the significance of this kind of thing. The people who go in for that sort of smear will attack any community they perceive as vulnerable. Otherwise, from the simple standpoint of the historical record, it is useful to have the impact of Madoff on the Jewish world set out clearly with the help of insiders' familiarity.
There is a string of appendices documenting the main narrative, and so there should be in such a book. Much the most interesting of these is Appendix B, the submission of Mr Markopolos to the SEC detailing no fewer than 29 `Red Flags' that left him in no doubt that the Madoff operation was fraudulent. I don't see it as the job of a review to dole out platitudes regarding either the ways in which so many people who were supposedly experts and unquestionably intelligent were taken in when the signs were there to be read by anyone willing to read them, thorough research and clearheaded comment being also supplied by Markopolos for any who were not too complacent to take notice of it. However it is probably worth saying something about the role, or lack of role, of the various regulatory bodies. The Strobers hint fairly heavily that such auditors come largely from the same background and culture as the people they are supposedly auditing, and that they fall down on the job for precisely that reason. I would concur, and add simply that another reason why regulators' investigations lack thoroughness is precisely that a later investigation that did its job properly would expose the fact that earlier exercises, by the same regulators, had fallen short.
I do not criticize this book for being an early account of the Madoff scandal, indeed I commend it for that very reason, as I said at the start. I have no way of knowing when we will ever know the `whole story' at least to the extent that we know other historical events such as the Great Depression. One thing that seems glaringly obvious to me is that the story is not going to end with Madoff. Even within his own organization someone was inputting the fraudulent data that spawned the fraudulent reports to investors, and we need to follow that chain of command back to its origins. However as well as Madoff we have already had Stanford, so who else is waiting to emerge from the wainscoting? Stay tuned.
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