How Bernie Madoff Became the Monster of Wall Street

Factual America

No one knows when Bernie Madoff created the Ponzi scheme that would one day lose $64 billion and ruin many lives. Madoff said it started late on. In this episode of Factual America, Joe Berlinger, director and executive producer of Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street, tells host, Matthew Sherwood, that he thinks it was right at the start of Madoff’s career, after he lost $30,000 of investors’ money and, upon receiving a loan to pay it back, chose to lie about what had happened rather than admit the truth.

Whatever the answer, Madoff did not act alone. Others helped him, both actively and – in the case of regulators and banks – through their negligence. Year after year, Madoff’s investments remained profitable despite this being financially impossible. He got away with it though, because, as Joe tells Matthew, ‘people just look the other way when greed is involved.’

In the end, it took a ‘Black Swan’ event – the 2008 financial crisis – to bring Madoff’s sham success to a cataclysmic end.

With his own longstanding interest in stock markets and thirty years experience as a documentary filmmaker, Joe Berlinger is the ideal man to tell the story of Bernie Madoff’s rise and fall. As well as discussing Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, Joe and Matthew look at how what happened with Madoff finds an echo today with the unfolding FTX scandal. They also discuss whether or not Joe worries about standing out from other filmmakers, and the struggle he had to distribute his first film, Brother’s Keeper, in 1992.

Watch the episode at https://factualamerica.com

“I wanted to dissect the Ponzi and how it worked, and what all those red flags were and why it's representative of such incompetence, or worse, on the part of a lot of institutions that should have known better...I wanted people to understand just how easy it is to manipulate and cheat the system in part as a cautionary tale.” – Joe Berlinger