An excellent spot by Stephen Glover in today's Independent, The press warned about Madoff – but no one listened, plus an equally excellent comment.
He points to an article written in May 2001 by a then Barron's magazine reporter, Erin E. Arvedlund, in which she fingered Bernie Madoff's hedge fund empire, claiming it was a scam. Glover writes:
"Did anyone take any notice? Of course not. Here is as good an example as you could hope to find of the press being ahead of regulators, politicians and professional investors – all of whom generally like to pretend that they are much smarter than journalists."
For the record, the best copy I could locate of Arvedlund's 2001 piece, for Barron's (part of the Wall Street Journal empire), can be found here . (The original is behind a pay wall). There is also an excerpt here. And Arvedlund explains to Portfolio.com here how and why she discovered what Madoff was doing.
