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"Even Bernie Madoff is a direct result of the Fed killing yield causing investors to seek returns wherever they could find them." You make the right point abou

• jswinghammer 16y ago
  When banks are offering 1% on deposits you are going to have weird situations arise where actors in the market are seeking yield on their money. Even Geithner acknowledged that.
  • mos1 16y ago
    Madoff was a cheat since the 80s or early 90s (the date of the inception of his fraud isn't precisely known). He robbed people who were greedy or foolish. He did so not by offering some sort of AAA product that got a few points more than treasuries, but by offering an opaque product with extremely high yield and almost no volatility. He never had a month where he lost more than 0.5%, and had net annual returns, every year, in the neighborhood of 15%. The Fed had nothing to do with him. I'd be shocked if more than about $1.50 and a bus ticket flowed into Madoff's funds from investors who were fleeing treasuries. Your comment tells us a lot about your predisposition to blame government first (even going so far as to directly blame them for a bad actor, and people who were fooled by the bad actor), but it's not a useful comment about the Fed at all.