Bernie Madoff Research Paper

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Rachel Hartman Research Paper Bernie Madoff Bernie Madoff was the mastermind behind one of the largest Ponzi schemes to date. His investment firm offered generous returns and brought in big name clients, like Steven Spielberg, Kevin Bacon, and Kyra Sedgewick. He earned clients’ trust by providing annual returns of 10 percent, and occasionally higher. At its peak, his firm handled up to 5 percent of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Bernie Madoff may have inherited some of his fraud-like ways from his parents. Ralph and Sylvia Madoff became involved in finance in the early 1950s, when their son was just a young teenager. They began a company called Gibraltar Securities in the 1960s, and listed their home address as their office. It didn’t take long for the SEC to shut down their business, due to them neglecting to report their financial position. They also hadn’t paid their taxes on their home for over 8 years,…show more content…
He was claiming returns that were theoretically impossible. Somehow, he continued to fool the Securities and Exchange Commission for nearly a decade. His good reputation and active role in the financial industry played a big role in enabling him to fly below the radar for so long. His position at NASDAQ aided him, as well as his advice to the SEC on trading securities. Ultimately, Bernie ended up backed into a corner. The stock market took a giant plunge in 2008. He was expected to pay his clients almost $7 billion, and he had no ways of doing so. Within two days of discussing this dilemma with his sons, he told them he was going to give them an early bonus of $173 million. Of course, this produced a large amount of confusion in his sons’ minds. So, they demanded an explanation. Bernie was forced to confess his fraudulent ways of business. His sons’ obviously did not approve, because they turned him in to authorities almost

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