[jonknee]

In the end not much money was actually lost though. The huge losses you see in the headlines were mainly the fake gains. If you "invested" $1m with me for 10 years and I reported a 26% annual return you would have a $10m account on paper, but the gains never existed and as such were never stolen. People who withdrew their gains were sued and had to return the money.

The scam was told to be $65B, but the actual losses were ~$17B and they have recovered more than half that (over $9B). Additionally the IRS let the losses be written off, so you and I ended up picking up another half of that tab.

tl;dr it was an awfully large scam, but not nearly as large as most think. Less than half the value of an instant message client actually and only a few Instagrams.

[pmorici]

What's you point? The amount of money lost doesn't really have anything to do with regulation. people filed lawsuits to get their money back.

Good regulation implies preventing fraud through rigorous rules and monitoring before it happens or if it does before it gets out of hand to the point of needing to resort to the courts.