We watched “Chasing Madoff” on TMN last week. While Bernie Madoff is a well documented disgusting person, it is even more disgusting that, when he brought Madoff to their attention, an honorable and courageous man like Harry Markopolos met resistance from the SEC, the nominal protector of financial markets in the United States.

It started in 1999. When asked to design an options portfolio to compete with Madoff, Markopolos decided, after less than 5 minutes, that the Madoff fund had to be a fraud.

The options market is extremely volatile. There is no real-world situation that can give an options fund the regular returns Bernie Madoff was showing. “Such a distribution simply doesn’t exist in finance.”

Being thorough it took Harry another 4 hours to prove it to his own satisfaction. You might wonder why the fraud lasted until late 2008.

Between 1999 and 2007 Harry delivered increasingly well supported…