Tonight I finished listening to the audiobook version of No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller, by Harry Markopolos. It is about his research into the fraudulent work of Barry Madoff and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's mishandling of that case. It would have been a good thriller as a novel but that it was all true was incredible.
The financial world is interesting to me. I've been attracted to it in one way or another ever since working in the business news sections of The Arizona Daily Star so many moons ago. And now that I'm taking a finance class this semester, it's even more interesting. I actually understood a lot of what Markopolos described.
But I've gotta tell you: listening to this book makes me want to just start stuffing money under my mattress instead of investing it. I trust my financial advisor, but can I trust that the funds she's placing my money into are all on the up and up? No. She wouldn't do anything deliberately, but as I learned from this book, just because the SEC says a fund is legitimate doesn't make it so.
Barry Madoff should have been caught in 1992 when the first alarm bells were sounded but he wasn't. They had many chances to bring him down but the alarms were ignored. It's all old news now but I didn't read everything that was written by The Wall Street Journal when it was written and I haven't read everything since.
One advantage of the audio version of the book was that audio clips from the Congressional hearings were embedded into the work. It also included spoken words of three separate investors who lost everything and the SEC's Inspector General, David Kotz.
Read the book or download it. Audible.com has it.
