Madoff Legit?

So says Dick Grasso, the former head of the NYSE in a piece in the Daily Beast. Grasso estimates Madoff made around seven hundred million to a billion just on trading alone. The way Grasso explains it, profits abounded from a practice that guaranteed a profit on each and every trade. When the NYSE went to Congress about what Madoff was doing Congress did nothing. It was like payola in the music biz....

The regional broker-dealers loved Bernie Madoff. OK, because they would convert an expense to a revenue. Let me explain that. If I was a regional broker-dealer and I sent an order to buy or sell a hundred shares of stock to the New York Stock Exchange and it had a limit price on it, which meant it had to be booked, when that order got executed, the specialist added a brokerage commission to that execution price.

Right.

So to the entering broker-dealer, that was an expense. Not only did you eliminate that expense if you sent that order to Bernie, because he didn’t charge you anything, he pays you a penny a share, [laughs] OK? So what might have cost you, you know, three quarters or a penny of a share as an incremental expense became a penny a share of revenue to the broker-dealer.

And your view was that was basically commercial bribery?

That’s what I thought it was. Look, there’s no secret, you can find testimony after testimony that I gave that it was like payola in the record business.

And the beat goes on. Read the piece. You'll find Congress in this up to their corrupt ears. MEANWHILE that fucking Frank poses each and every day on TV spouting his lies and opinions safe from any retribution.