The Obama administration is siding with big banks in a dispute over their alleged role in the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr., in a 22-page filing late Friday, urged the Supreme Court to let stand a lower court ruling that would bar Madoff Trustee Irving Picard from pursuing billions of dollars in claims against the likes of HSBC, UBS and Italy’s UniCredit, which Picard alleges helped enable the scam to take place. Picard had also sued Madoff’s primary banker, JPMorgan Chase, seeking some $19 billion in damages. Earlier this year, Chase agreed to pay $543 million to settle the case, but the appeals involving the remaining banks have continued. The banks have denied wrongdoing, and argue that Picard has no standing to sue them on behalf of Madoff’s clients. More on CNBC [...]

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Bernard Madoff’s fraud might have been detected with enough due diligence in mid-2006, more than two years before the Ponzi scheme collapsed, a U.S. Tax Court judge ruled. That means it’s possible, Judge Diane Kroupa said, that the estate of a New York man who died that year is entitled to a $1.9 million refund for death taxes paid on his $4.8 million Madoff account — an account revealed to be worthless after the fraud was uncovered. Kroupa, in a decision May 21, didn’t assess the likelihood that Bernard Kessel’s estate can prove its case. She did say, though, that it can try to do so at a Tax Court trial where lawyers may iron out a new wrinkle in the financial mess created by Madoff’s crimes. Other challenges to estate taxes on Madoff accounts are under administrative appeal at the IRS, Stephen Krass, a New York attorney representing the estate. More on Bloomberg [...]

A U.S. Tax Court judge on Wednesday rejected the Internal Revenue Service’s attempt to net a quick win in a case over how the IRS should value a Bernie Madoff-managed account that allegedly wasn’t worth what the account owner had reported to the agency. Judge Diane L. Kroupa denied the IRS’ motion for partial summary judgment, finding that there were issues of material facts about the worth of the account, managed by Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. More on Law360 [...]

Millennials Have No Idea Who Bernie Madoff Was
And that says a lot about their financial mindset

One of my favorite things about graduation season is reflecting on the mindset of young people embarking on their first career. For the 1.6 million Millennials entering the real world this spring, the Cold War has always been over and the Internet has always existed. They have no living memory of when testing positive for HIV was akin to a death sentence. For them, Sam Kinison and Freddie Mercury have always been dead. Email is too slow; snail mail, unthinkable. Cursive is a forgotten skill. Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive movie director than the brutish Dirty Harry. Korean cars have always been ubiquitous on American roads. In a new poll, more than half of 18-to-29 year olds could not identify the Bernie Madoff investment scam—a defining $65 billion fraud and the largest Ponzi scheme in history. This scandal broke in 2008 and has been in the news repeatedly. Trusting investors lost their life savings and many will never fully recover. Yet in just half a decade young people have largely forgotten the scam and, presumably, the lessons that sprang from it. More in Time here.
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