Legal Commentary

Madoff: "They Had To Know"

By Big Tent Democrat

NYTimes:

[Bernie Madoff] asserted that unidentified banks and hedge funds were somehow “complicit” in his elaborate fraud, an about-face from earlier claims that he was the only person involved.

[. . .] He spoke with great intensity and fluency about his dealings with various banks and hedge funds, pointing to their “willful blindness” and their failure to examine discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information available to them. “They had to know,” Mr. Madoff said. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’”

"They had to know" seems the operative phrase of the past decade. "They had to know" that the Bush tax cuts would blow up the budget. "They had to know" the Iraq Debacle was a fraud. "They had to know" that Wall Street was a crooked casino. "They had to know" that banks were abusing HAMP. And so on.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on February 16, 2011 (boomark / email).