Jaysuz! Ya couldn’t make it up could you? Just when you think that the finance watchdogs of the western world couldn’t fuck up any worse, along comes the story of Bernard Madoff and his 50 billion pyramid scheme.

Not only did the SEC fail to perform even a spot inspection of this geezer as a matter of routine, they appear to have entirely ignored / failed to act on information received from an apparently reliable source, advising them of the large-scale Ponzi fraud being perpetuated by Madoff for years!

Not that the investors in the scheme looked any closer! If they had, they might have picked up a fair number of red flags including:-

• Madoff’s own brother was assigned to monitor checks and balances in at least one part of the hedge fund.
• Madoff’s auditors were a one man and his dog operation housed in a 13ft by 8ft office in Rockland County, New York.
• The management fees being charged by Madoff were significantly lower than any being offered by his Wall street competitors.
• Hardly anyone was ever allowed to meet Madoff in person and the few that did always came away completely clueless as to how he made his money.
• In the more recent turbulent times when every investment on the planet was being shaken and stirred, Madoff’s fund continued reporting a 0-2% value increase per month
• And let’s not forget the man’s name itself! I mean…seriously, would you invest your cash with a guy called “Made off”? You can say this about the bloke: he has certainly lived up to his name.

This colossal financial farce could have been taken directly from Charles Dickens’ “Little Dorrit” – except you can guarantee that the thieving bastards responsible won’t see the in side of a real debtors prison…they’ll just spend a few months in a country club version when the golf course doesn’t open until 10am and the Chateau Grand Traverse is served at room temperature.

Perhaps what we need to do is bring back the Victorian concept of the debtors prison…but only for those who defraud hapless investors on a large scale. We could set a benchmark of…say…a million bucks or more. Then we ensure that the prison is staffed entirely by investors who got royally screwed by these gits and are looking for some serious payback.

Inmates would be obliged to directly perform all their own cooking, laundry, cleaning and ablutions with no access to recreation facilities except:-

• A single chess set with 31 missing pieces
• A single knitting magazine with a pull-out supplement on crocheting bobble hats.
• A single crossword puzzle book with all the puzzles completed
• A single copy of the film: “Wallpapering, pasting and stippling: a DIY guide”

In addition, inmates would be put to work once weekly on a chain gang, digging ditches, building roads etc. Pay will be 1 buck per inmate per day (tax paid ;)), sent to their creditors. Attempts by inmates to avoid their obligations or bribe any prison official in any way will result in a minimum punishment of an hour’s electric shock therapy and waterboarding, the time increasing exponentially on each subsequent occurrence.

Oh – and inmates will serve a minimum of 5 years, the sentence increasing exponentially for every additional million they steal.

Put this system in place and then sit back and watch the honesty bloom on Wall Street!

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