guardian.co.uk – The Independent’s Jeremy Warner is not convinced and argues that the failure is entirely their own. In the Daily Telegraph, Richard Fletcher explains that though Horlick blames US regulators for their lack of oversight her clients should be asking her some tough questions. In The Times, Daniel Finkelstein says what you need to understand about Charles Ponzi’s scheme is that when he started it, it wasn’t a Ponzi scheme. It just got out of hand.
David Wighton says the sums involved are breathtaking. He suggests there must be a worry that other boom-time frauds will now be exposed by the bust. David Aaronovitch says by last week he was ready for Bernard Madoff. He had read JK Galbraith’s The Great Crash 1929 and taken his point that in boom times the rate of embezzlement grows because the promised rewards don’t seem as absurd as they actually are and the rate of discovery falls off. In the Daily Mail, Alex Brummer says that the £33bn fraud by Madoff could spell the end for the most controversial investment vehicles of recent years: hedge funds.