When Worlds Collide: Spitzer Lost Money With Madoff

From Clusterstock.com: Elliott Spitzer Lost Money With Madoff:

Add the name Eliot Spitzer to the list of prominent people allegedly ripped off by Wall Street trader Bernard L. Madoff. Yesterday at Slate's holiday party Spitzer, who is writing a column for the online publication, confirmed that his family's firm had investments with a Madoff subsidiary.

I love it when two stories intersect (however loosely). It sounds like the Seinfeld episode "The Pool Guy"when George's girlfriend Susan starts being friends with Elaine.

HT: FinanceProfessor.com

Could Blogging Have Stopped Madoff?

Here's a very interesting piece from the New York Stock Exchange's blog:

...Certainly, any failure to convince others was not due to lack of effort. Perhaps Mr. Markopolos lacked only an effective medium to communicate his warning. Here's a thought experiment: What would have happened if Mr. Markopolos had blogged his analysis? That is, what if he had posted the entire piece on a blog, under his name or a pseudonym?

RTWT here

I think the blogger has a point. True, blogging wasn't available back in the late 1990's. But if it were, my guess is that a blog post like the one he muses about would have been picked up and passed around from trading desk to trading desk, and eventually gotten aired by a major news outlet. When a story like this "goes viral", it's hard to stop. And as a card-carrying financial economist, I typically fall on the side of "More Information is Good".

Finally, who knew the NYSE had a blog. Verrrrryyyyy Interesting.