You can access testimony in the Financial Servicess Committee Hearing on the Madoff Scheme on the Committee’s webpage for the Hearing here: Assessing the Madoff Ponzi Scheme and the Need for Regulatory Reform. You can also access a link to a video of the Hearing on the webpage for the Hearing. (The video contains a discussion over whether the Hearing is really an “official” Hearing due to the fact that the 110th Congress had official concluded and the new Congress had not been sworn in yet.)
Read the testimony of one IRA investor’s nightmare here.
Also, don’t miss Leon M. Metzger’s testimony here. In his testimony, Mr. Metzger, an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, and Yale University, provides a list of items he “might study” to understand better a proposed investment’s “operational controls.” (pg. 5) Mr. Metzger who teaches “hedge-fund management courses” notes the following in his testimony:
On Opening Day of the semester, I ask the students, “Imagine that the only information you have about a fund I am offering to you is its 20-year track record and that the investment has been audited by a Big Four accounting firm since its inception. How many of you would invest in it if, over the last twenty years, its annualized return, net of fees, is 40 percent? With this example, [my] aim is to illustrate that investment risk is commensurate with reward–investment fraud is not even a consideration. Typically, almost everyone in the class raises his or her hand. My objective as a teacher is to chip away at that outcome so that when I repeat that question at the last class, there is no hand in the air.