It has been referred to as the worst scandal the world has ever seen in the world of finance.  While that type of language is hyperbolic at best, there can be no denying that the world was sorely shaken when Bernie Madoff was revealed to be nothing more than a financial criminal.  He had been one of the most respected investors up to that point and now at the height of the modern financial crisis of our time this supposed rock in the storm was nothing more than another person that had been dishonest and ended up paying the price for it.

Bernie Madoff was a man that was so respected that a lot of people started wondering exactly how he could get away with things for such a long period of time.  It spurred on a lot of questions about the current existence of the financial system with most of those questions not returning particularly satisfying answers. 

While the Madoff scandal is one that will likely stay with us for a long time, these questions must be asked from a position of understanding.  For that reason, join us on a brief journey through the scandal itself, starting from the honest beginnings to the rise and fall of the dishonest operation that followed and eventually swallowed what started as an honest operation.

Before the Scandal

Bernie Madoff did not start life off as a financial luminary.  In fact, the opposite was quite the truth.  The fact of the matter is that when he was originally born, Madoff did not have any inkling of what lay ahead of him in life.  He worked originally as a lifeguard with installation of sprinkler systems being done on the side.  That was his life up until 1960.  By the time that year came around, Madoff had already put aside $5000 in savings.  By current standards that money would be worth around $35,000.

The firm that he started in 1960 with that amount of money was a trading business that specialized in the trading of penny stocks.  As the name implies, these are stocks that are worth peanuts in comparison to the big boys.  They are small start-up businesses or else companies that have fallen down and are looking to rebound.  Whatever the reason for the value might be, penny stocks are indeed stocks that you can get for pennies and sometimes a single penny per share in the business.

Trading these stocks under normal circumstances is a very risky thing to do.  It is just as likely that a particular company will fold and lose all of your money than it is that it will grow and justify your faith in the stock.  With merely $5000 of starting capital, Madoff decided that his best chance at big returns was through this and for that reason decided to cut his financial teeth on the penny stock market.  In this, he was helped by his father-in-law, a man that was responsible for referring to Madoff the first large circle of clients that he was able to enjoy.

It was during this point in time that Madoff Securities developed the NASDAQ system for the dissemination of quotes through the use of information technology.  It was to help compete with the larger firms that were already well entrenched in the New York Stock Exchange.  For that reason, Madoff will always at the very least be able to point to the NASDAQ system as being one of the major achievements in his life.  Whether that will be worth anything to history is another story as right now that achievement is more than overshadowed by the staggering amount of fraud that he is responsible for.

From the 1970s right on through to 2008, Bernie Madoff was certainly responsible for making some of his clients money.  However, as will become apparent later on in this discussion, that money was not made honestly.  It was essentially part of one of the largest Ponzi operations if not the largest one that the world has ever seen.  During this period of time however, he was certainly viewed with a mixture of awe and envy depending on the specific person that you talked to.