I don’t know whether the Sulzberger family exerts any influence on the NYTimes‘ editors. All I know is that today’s business section seems pretty heavily loaded on the Bernard Madoff case. Bernie’s a legendary money manager who appears to have been bilking hedge funds and the super-wealthy out of their money in a huge (he says $50 billion) Ponzi scheme.
Now, I know it’s a big story (although no one knows how deep the losses really are yet), but I get the feeling that if it weren’t about the pain of wealthy people and socialites, we might not see four articles totaling more than 4,500 words in one edition: 1, 2, 3, and 4.
The best part about today’s Lifestyles of the No-Longer-So-Rich coverage in the Times is that the paper chose this very day to debut a new bi-weekly web column about . . . money strategies for the wealthy!
Of course, these strategies aren’t just for the wealthy! Writes columnist Paul Sullivan, “While his [Robert Seaberg, head of wealth management at — no lie — a branch of Citigroup, the bank that lobbied for a $300 billion backstop from the U.S. government and plans to fire 52,000 people next year, most of whom I assume are not super-wealthy] findings are geared toward the highest end of the investing community, people at every wealth level should take note.”
After all:
While losing 40 percent of $100 million gives those investors more wiggle room than that same decline on $100,000, it still requires them to re-evaluate their view of risk, if not a change to their lifestyles.
Good to know!
For my part, I’m just happy that Amy & I started watching Arrested Development this month. I expect to find out that Madoff had a cross-eyed Judy Greer for his secretary:
Or that his sons are really amateur magicians or anxiety-prone dilettantes. But Life doesn’t always imitate canceled TV, I guess.
(Update! The NYPost has a couple of pieces on the story, too. I was convinced that one of their quotes was by an alias for Andre 3000, but it turns out that Montieth Illingworth is a real person! Oh, and it turns out that Madoff’s key strategy was betting on the spread between bids and asks, which — to my untrained ear — sounds a bunch like the “vacuuming up nickels” strategy of LTCM that went awry when it scaled up. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the case of a long-time friend of my mother who got into trouble similar to this, although in his case, I don’t think it wasn’t a Ponzi scheme as much as a case of “I just lost some of X’s money on some bad investments, so if I just move some of Y’s money into X’s account, no one will be any the wiser once my next batch of investments pay off.” And the missing money added up to around $2.5 million, which is bad, but not as bad as (allegedly) $50 billion.)