Susan Blumenfeld Interiors Bernard L. Madoff’s office.

As the revelations continue about Madoff’s business, this time in the real estate sector, as this link to The New York Times explains, there are other questions which need answering. It’s very unlikely so many billions could just vanish without somebody knowing what was going on. Big business is quite like politics in many ways. Simple as it is to blame politicians for everything, the fact is they generally get a lot of help making their disasters truly spectacular. Like politicians, big financiers have facilitators, insiders, fixer, minders, information sources. Mr. Madoff clearly had a lot of contacts from his decades in business, but it’s slightly improbable that the rest of the US financial system and some of America’s wealthiest people became charities overnight. All that investment, of that much money, with no oversight, just doesn’t ring true. You can’t just assume, during the series of financial crises which have afflicted America since 1987, that nobody was paying attention. Surely some lost auditor might have accidentally wandered into the accounts. Perhaps even an accountant may have got trapped in the building and decided to pass the time doing some work. There’s been a lot of talk about the laissez faire culture of American financial regulation, but that’s never been the whole story. Regulation doesn’t prevent crime, it just classifies it and tries to penalize it. The fact is that the culture of insiders has been the accepted norm for generations. (It’s also left an ungodly smell of sycophancy, insanity, nepotism, greed and incompetence across the sector, but that’s what happens if you don’t care about your financial hygiene.) A few questions: 1. Is it possible that one person, acting alone, could crash so much investment money? 2. Who knew what, when, about the state of Madoff’s business? 3. Why did all this information have to wait until the situation was in its current, apparently irrecoverable, condition? 4. Who was involved in what, and what are the legal issues? 5. Why do investors appear to have been left uninformed, for so long? 6. The natural course of business, during the meltdown, has been that everyone’s been looking at their bottom line, and trying to cover themselves, bailing our as fast as possible. Yet with all these billions on the line, this particular business didn’t? 7. If you accept that Madoff was naturally exposed to risk in the business environment, how could those investments just sail on majestically until they sank? 8. This is the one and only investment service in America where nobody else at all was benefiting from such huge amounts of money? I’m no advocate of trial by media, and Mr. Madoff is entitled to his legal rights. I think the law, and the media, should be widening the net, not just concentrating on the guy sitting in the chair when the ship went down. I spent years in corporate regulation, and as a private watcher of the markets, and I’ve seen hundreds of corporate collapses, and none of this stacks up as normal. Money attracts vermin, and this business of Madoff’s was rolling in the stuff. It would be the first time in recorded history that any investment house has gone under without some direct inputs from its own built in gravy train. There's no room for naiveté in this situation. Whatever was able to achieve such total failure of the norms of business practice has to be shut down, permanently. Doing business on handshakes is one thing. Doing business wearing blindfolds is another.