[_yosefk]

I can't believe all the comments saying pretty much what you said.

How much bloody staff do you need to take a peek at the securities kept at a fund's bank account? We aren't talking "complex" stuff like rating agencies putting AAA ratings on junk (and BTW S&P was slapped on its wrist with a >$1B fine over that after an investigation). We're talking about a guy with almost no staff who paid "returns on investments" from his pool of investments.

The sum of the securities he'd keep would thus fall far behind the number following from his reports. Not noticing can only result from not checking. Not checking that much after multiple warnings results from defunding?! Perhaps, if there was just the janitor left and all the regulators were fired. Was that the case?

(You know what could be a probable cause other than incompetence or taking bribes? A desire to be employed by a Wall Street firm after resigning as a regulator, and a belief that it wouldn't work out if Madoff were checked and found clean, or even if checked and found guilty. But is it more than a convoluted bribe?)

[eli_gottlieb]

It's easy to know, after the fact, that Madoff was a Ponzi scheme, and say he should have been investigated. But that neglects two important numbers: how many prospective Ponzi schemes were there to investigate, and of those, how many actual Ponzi schemes, out of which Madoff's was only one?