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From video: Would Bernie Madoff's Fraud Even Be That Bad By Today's Standards?
Published: January 21, 2026

Video Description

👉 To learn for free on Brilliant for a full 30 days, go to http://www.brilliant.org/howhistoryworks OR scan the QR code onscreen, or click on the link in the description. Brilliant’s also given our viewers 20% off an annual Premium subscription, which gives you unlimited daily access to everything on Brilliant. ----- Sign up for my FREE newsletter! - https://www.compoundeddaily.com/ My other channels: @HowMoneyWorks @HowMoneyWorksUncut ------ #history #business #finance Link To Our Other Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/HowMoneyWorks Written By: Sam Video Created By: Svibe Multimedia Studio Editor: Cardan Media Gatherer: Andrea Rivas Footage Courtesy of: Getty Images Music Provided By: Epidemic Sound 📩 Business Inquiries ➡️ sponsors@worksmedia.group ---- His fraud may be all he is remembered for today, but (whether we would like to admit it or not), he changed the landscape of modern investing in more ways than we acknowledge. Ironically had it not been for his Ponzi Scheme, he may be remembered even LESS fondly for the other financial tools he pioneered like payment for order flow, dark pools, online trading, FINRA , and the proliferation of hedge fund “market makers”. But perhaps more concerningly, his crimes also tell us a lot about the way our financial system operates to this day which is revealed just by asking the most logical question of… how did he think this was all going to end? He was a veteran of the financial industry taking money off some of the richest and (supposedly) smartest investors in the world, running an operation that by its very nature was inherently unstable… It also raises the question of, what did his victims ACTUALLY think they were investing in? The whole system was propped up on the three pillars of obscurity, ambiguity and exclusivity which are coincidently very commonplace in a lot of the biggest firms today. Of course nobody is saying that something like; “any of the several thousand private equity funds operating in America today ARE a ponzi scheme”… but the point is… if they WERE, it would be very hard to find out until it was too late… and these days, that might actually have real consequences… Perhaps the biggest irony in the Madoff story though is that… despite being one of the largest frauds in financial history… it didn’t really hurt any of its ultra wealthy victims too badly, at least not badly enough to enact any meaningful change… Good ol Bernie exposed a lot of flaws in our system… and all of them were quickly glossed over as he was shipped off to prison… Nobody wants to learn from history when there is a profit to be made by forgetting it…