Sometimes it’s an advantage not to be part of the Wall Street/New York clique. Today is certainly one of those rare times. The dodging, shifting, I saw it along time ago, of course we all knew what was going on nonsense that has eminated from the blogs and the papers with regard to the Ponzi scheme that Bernard Madoff was running is just too rich.

This morning I logged into my RSS feeds and the PR machine was working in overdrive. The story got more coverage than the auto bailout and every one seemed to have seen it coming. Some chick named Casandra was reputed to have written the best post ever about this silly affair so I clicked over. I got a blog post full of the F-word claiming that way back in 1999 she warned someone off about Madoff and ever since then knew what was going on. So, Casandra why didn’t you call him out? 

The day wore on and more and more of the insiders pointed out how everyone knew what this guy was up to. The only honest commentators I ran into were the Tech Tickers fellows who at least called it as it probably went down. They said essentially that this guy was a known fraudster, everyonr  realized he was working a scam but they got on board anyway because they thought he was trading on inside information. 

So if all of these fine financial types knew this some time ago why didn’t any of them rat him out? Where were all of these fine blogsters when, according to them, the world knew that this guy was purpoting to turn water into wine? Where indeed.

What we really have here is one more example of the depths to which the Wall Street crowd has sunk. They’ve made their billions and should now quietly retire to wherever people like them go. What we don’t need is more blog posts and articles from the local newspapers trying to spin this into a failure on the part of the SEC or some other regulatory body. The reality is that the culture of Wall Street was completely corrupted and Madoff is just a little slice of that life. Had all of the outraged writers done their job, had all of the insiders who now claim to have known that he couldn’t have made the returns he advertised spoken up some time ago, there wouldn’t now be a lot of people who lost a lot of money. But they didn’t speak up and now we get to see one more example of the gutter that used to be called the financial capital of the world.

Here are some of the posts today on the Madoff affair:Cassandra, Bronte Capital, Infectious Greed, Portfolio.com, New York Times, Tech Ticker (best). It goes on but you will get the picture.