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Madoff's Willing Partners  Discussion Policy By Len Fisher
Saturday, December 20, 2008  There seems to be little doubt that
Bernard Madoff is a cheat. His apparent Ponzi scheme, in which
capital from new investors would have been used to pay
"dividends" to earlier investors, ultimately cost the
participants many billions of dollars. But was it all Madoff's
fault? I contend that the losses would have been less severe,
and might not have occurred at all, if many of the Madoff's
investors had not been cast from the same mold that Madoff was.
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Items in This Story  The facts should have been enough to make
anyone suspicious. Madoff's accounts were only perfunctorily
audited, and his statements were printed with a dot-matrix
printer on lightweight copier paper. Above all, his business
returns were consistently good -- too good -- and he never
reported a down month, let alone a down quarter o