We are all Madoff investors: James Saft

-- James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --

By James Saft

LONDON (Reuters) - It was perhaps inevitable that we ended 2008, the year we learned we were up the creek, with a great financial scandal: the Madoff Ponzi case. What is even more remarkable is the way in which the alleged fleecing of many billions of dollars from wealthy people and charities -- investors who should have known better or employed people who did -- serves as a mirror for the broader culture, showing how we went wrong and where we are left now that we realize our errors.

The main difference really is that Madoff's purported victims, or enablers or co-fantasists, say they found out their wealth was illusory all of a sudden whereas for most people in the English-speaking world, this is happening little by little.

Bernard Madoff, for those of you just waking after a long winter's nap, is accused of defrauding as much as $50 billion from investors in funds he promised would deliver a steady -- suspiciously steady -- 12 percent or so a year in good times or bad. But rather than a miraculous hedging strategy, authorities say Madoff has confessed to running a pretty simple Ponzi operation: paying out "earnings" to those who demanded them from new commitments of cash from those who wanted in. And of course, given that the man could "make" heady sums with no risk in all markets, the cash flowed in and the redemption calls were, for a long time, manageable.

Madoff has not appeared in court to formally answer the charges. But that there was one man, or a man with confederates perhaps, who was willing to engage in a harebrained fraud that was mathematically doomed to failure would not be that surprising, sadly. That an army of either rich sophisticated investors or their highly paid advisors played along and, seemingly, genuinely believed that they were growing rich is far more interesting.

One point, highlighted by Tim Lee of consultancy piEconomics in Stamford, Connecticut, is that the $50 billion headline figure is about as inflated as California real estate prices were a year ago. That $50 billion is likely to turn out to be not the amount lost but the amount people wrongly thought they had. It's likely that the actual strategy followed by Madoff could return little more than Treasury notes minus fees; in other words he could make for you what you could get for yourself with no help but then pay himself handsomely for the gymnastics.

That implies that a lot -- for long-time investors the vast majority -- of their "money" invested and now "lost" with Madoff was about as notional as a credit default swap contract with a man you met outside the bus station downtown. Much of the money never existed, other than on the attractive and no-doubt glossy statements sent by Madoff. It was simply what people would have had if he'd been a genie.

EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS