Bernie Madoff - "[The] whole government is a Ponzi scheme"

From the NY magazine article:

Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff said in a magazine interview published Sunday that new regulatory reform enacted after the recent national financial crisis is laughable and that the federal government is a Ponzi scheme.

"The whole new regulatory reform is a joke," Madoff said during a telephone interview with New York magazine in which he discussed his disdain for the financial industry and for its regulators.

The interview was published on the magazine's website Sunday night.

Madoff did an earlier New York Times interview in which he accused banks and hedge funds of being "complicit" in his Ponzi scheme to fleece people out of billions of dollars. He said they failed to scrutinize the discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information.

He said in the New York magazine interview the Securities and Exchange Commission "looks terrible in this thing," and he said the "whole government is a Ponzi scheme.
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What he did was obviously illegal and immoral, but to say that LOTS of people/organizations/regulators didn't know about it is naive in purest form. Bernie just got caught. As said by one of the commenters, isn't social security by definition a Ponzi scheme?
Source -> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Madoff-to-NY-magazine-apf-2369562769.html?x=0&.v=2 and http://nymag.com/news/features/berniemadoff-2011-3/