Investigation
First reader-suggested story in a while and we love to publish those, so keep’em coming! Harry Markopolos (the Bernie Madoff whistle-blower we posted about on March of last year) is back at it with a quick and scathing article on Business Week. Many ways to look at it, but we highlight three in our post. We also like that he doesn’t deny that genius exists, it’s just that he assumes fraud “until genius is proven” and advocates thorough investigation.
From the “better late than never series”, a July 2010 special series by the Washington Post is way too enlightening to ignore even now. It’s about the huge inefficiencies brought by uncontrolled – and unaccountable – spending in the Intelligence/Military complex after the 9/11 attacks. Some will point out that, since then, a certain high-profile terrorist has been found and dealt with, but it doesn’t change the main arguments of the articles. In fact, there’s still a world of lessons to be learned and mental models to be taken from these pieces.
There’s lots of interesting content in Amazon.com’s launch page for “No One Would Listen”, a book by the main whistleblower in the Bernie Madoff saga. The timeline in particular is very impressive: it shows that it took ten years to uncover the mess – nine since the first contact with the SEC – by which time the problem was irreversible. And that’s far from the only case, which begs a question… How do we justify still having institutions supposed to keep watch so unready and unwilling to investigate red flags?
