The Wizard of Lies

Much has been made of all the greed that led to the crash of 2008/2009. Much anger has been directed at bankers and investment bankers. Clearly many did engage in highly speculative behavior and skirted grey areas of the investment business. But one man redefined greed.and manipulation on Wall Street. If it was a time of cutting corners, then Bernie Madoff went off the road. Madoff may have been a crook, but he didn't exist in a vacuum. His behavior reflected the extreme temper of the times on a Wall Street - a place he helped shape and that he intimately understood. He was not, as  financial journalist Diana Henriques has said, not inhumanly monstrous, but rather monstrously human. My conversation with New York Times senior financial writer Diana Henriques about her book The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the death of Trust. var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-6296941-2"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}