No One Would Listen Quotes

“Certainly one of the most important things I learned is that numbers can be deceiving. There is a logic to mathematics, but there is also the underlying human element that must be considered. Numbers can't lie, but the people who create those numbers can and do. As so many people have learned, forgetting to include human nature in an equation can be devastating.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“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.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“Ponzi schemes exist in stable disequilibrium. This means that while they can’t ultimately succeed, they can persist indefinitely—until they don’t.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“the split-strike conversion strategy. Option traders often referred to it as a “collar” or “bull spread.” Basically, it involved buying a basket of stocks, in Madoff’s case 30 to 35 blue-chip stocks that correlated very closely to the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 100-stock index, and then protecting the stocks with put options. By bracketing an investment with puts and calls, you limit your potential profit if the market rises sharply; but in return you’ve protected yourself against devastating losses should the market drop. The calls created a ceiling on his gains when the market went up; the puts provided a floor to cut his losses when the market went down.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“I believe half of what they teach students will be obsolete within five years and the other half is just outright false.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“Currently the SEC headquarters are in Washington, D.C., and Washington, D.C., is the place where you’ll find a lot of politicians, but not very many qualified finance professionals. As New York is the world’s largest financial center and Boston is the world’s fourth largest financial center, moving the SEC to New York City or elsewhere in the New York-New England corridor makes a lot of sense.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“The SEC pays peanuts and then wonders how it ended up with so many monkeys. Firms in the financial industry pay a salary plus a bonus”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“First, banish the lawyers from the land. Currently the SEC, like most Washington agencies, is dominated by lawyers. In 2009 all five SEC Commissioners were lawyers. Now, I have nothing against lawyers. I’m sure they are good to their children, and many of them contribute to charities. But putting them in charge of supervising our capital markets has been an unmitigated disaster. It would be like putting a political appointee in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and expecting him to handle a flood. Very few SEC lawyers understand the complex financial instruments of the twenty-first century, and almost none have ever sat on a trading desk or worked in the industry other than doing legal work. A primary reason the SEC has reached this point is that historically the SEC Commissioners have been lawyers who may know where to find the best power lunches in Washington, D.C., but don’t have a clue as to how the financial industry actually operates on a day-to-day basis.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“was well known in the industry that the greatest desire of many, if not most, SEC employees was to obtain a job inside the securities industry. A stint at the SEC was simply an important addition to their resumes before moving on to join the industry that they were supposed to regulate.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“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.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“Somebody needed to warn the public that the SEC was an out-of-control agency that served no obvious purpose other than to fool people into believing it was actually offering investors protection.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“the health care industry makes Wall Street look honest. It’s a $2-trillion-a-year business with no controls and with limited auditing. On Wall Street the crooks at least have the decency to try to hide their frauds, but those people cheating Medicare don’t even bother doing that. Wall Street is only taking your life savings, but in health care they may be stealing your life. I was surprised to discover how little “care” there is in health care.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“These guys, they work for five years at the Commission, then they become a compliance manager at a hedge fund.” And, he added, he knew that was true because every time an SEC investigator came up to his office he or she would ask for an employment application.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“Warren Buffett said, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” The financial crisis of 2008 revealed many, including Madoff, to be inappropriately attired. Effective regulation must mean that the skinny-dippers are stopped while the tide is still in.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“For years, I observed and experienced the SEC protecting large perpetrators of abuse at the expense of the investors whom the SEC is supposed to protect. The SEC has been very tough, and usually appropriately so, on small-time cons, promoters, insider traders, and, yes, hedge funds. But when it comes to large corporations and institutionalized Wall Street, the SEC uses kid gloves, imposes meaningless nondeterring fines, and emphasizes relatively unimportant things like record keeping rather than the substance of important things—like investors being swindled.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“The fact that seemingly sophisticated investors would give Madoff hundreds of millions of dollars after he refused to allow them to conduct ordinary due diligence was a tribute to either greed or stupidity. The”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“he refused to let them conduct the necessary due diligence. They wanted to conduct a standard financial investigation to make certain he was legitimate and had been turned down. That’s the brightest warning signal of all. Due”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“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”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“that if you hadn’t failed big, then you couldn’t achieve bigger.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“Every mathematician loves the hunt for the sour numbers in an equation.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“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.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“It is surprising that nobody actually knows how many hedge funds or money management firms operating as hedge funds exist in this country. There are no regulations that require funds to register; in fact, there are actually few regulations that they have to follow.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“forgetting to include human nature in an equation can be devastating.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“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!”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“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.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“Nobody on Wall Street has ever let a poor personality stand in the way of profit,”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“Obviously we weren’t shocked to find gambling in Casablanca, or swindlers on Wall Street.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“Although I don’t dislike business schools, I believe half of what they teach students will be obsolete within five years and the other half is just outright false.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“Ponzi schemes exist in stable disequilibrium.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen

“Constant Obligation Leveraged Originated Structured Oscillating Money Bridged Asset Guarantees, or Colostomy Bags. Designed to accommodate the most sophisticated investment strategies, Colostomy Bags contain the equity tranches of Structured High Interest Taxable derivatives, or Shit, and are leveraged an infinite amount of times through the innovative use of derivatives.”
― Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen