21 Quotes by Harry Markopolos

The SEC now is 3500 chickens, and we need to get some foxes in there.

I was a regular in detention. My parents never knew, though; I managed to convince my mother that I was in a special honors program that met on Saturday mornings. She would brag to her friends that her son Harry was so smart he was invited to attend honors classes on Saturdays!

Bernie Madoff had confessed to his two sons that his multibillion-dollar investment firm was a complete fraud. There were no investments, he had told them; there never had been.

I believe half of what they teach students will be obsolete within five years and the other half is just outright false.

That certainly wasn’t my only reason for wanting to bring down the SEC, but I knew that the lives of many, many thousands of other investors had been changed drastically because these arrogant people failed to do their jobs. I admit it: I wanted them to pay.

SEC audits consisted primarily of confirming that a checklist of documents existed, not necessarily that these documents were accurate, not even that they reflected real trades – just that you had the proper papers in your files.

In the early 1990s Madoff Securities was reputed to be responsible for almost 10 percent of the daily trading of New York Stock Exchange-listed securities.

The fact that there was something strange going on with Bernie Madoff’s ’s operation was not a secret on Wall Street. As soon as I started asking questions, I discovered that people had been questioning Madoff’s claims for a long time; but even those people who had questioned his strategy had accepted his nonsensical explanations-as long as the returns kept rolling in. The.

Ponzi schemes exist in stable disequilibrium. This means that while they can’t ultimately succeed, they can persist indefinitely – until they don’t.