Informed Americans think they know all about the Madoff affair: for decades charismatic fund manager Bernard Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme, thereby bilking the cream of New York society, but he was eventually found out and jailed. What is less well known – and far more geopolitically important – is what the Madoff affair says about the truly abysmal state of U.S. financial regulation. Not to put too fine a point on it, the SEC emerges from the affair not so much incompetent, as many have charitably assumed, but corrupt. Frankly it is hard to find a similarly lamentable instance of regulatory malfunction outside the Third World. More in Forbes here.
