Netflix series about Madoff invests in the wrong story – 02/17/2023 – Market

What Bernie Madoff did to his victims was a scam. What makes the Netflix docuseries about his story is, to say the least, a bad investment.

The largest pyramid scheme in recorded history, operated by one of Wall Street’s most respected figures, is truly impressive—so impressive that it has been told many times (“The Wizard of Lies,” “Madoff” and ” Chasing Madoff”, to quote just the first IMDb search results).

To try to stand out from the crowd, director Joe Berlinger’s bet, who has works about murderers on his resume, is to portray Madoff as a kind of financial serial killer, “the monster of Wall Street”, as his work was originally titled.

Thus, in the first episode, we are introduced to the origin story of this villain, not much more complex than those told by Marvel: an ambitious and intelligent boy born into a family with an unstable financial life, headed by a failed father.

Armed with this profound psychological reading, Berlinger leads the next three chapters of the story. There are countless times when one of the interviewees characterizes Madoff as a sociopath or some variation thereof.

But in case you, the viewer, still haven’t been able to understand the thesis, slow-motion reenactments of a Madoff smoking cigars (a never-before-seen portrait of a Wall Street big shot) or facing the camera with a sly smile are repeated, over and over again. new.

It’s a gimmick that might work well in dramatizations of murder, but not so well for forging investment bank statements on 1980s dot matrix printers.

Even some of the documentary’s hits turn out to be misses. The sources heard, such as Diana B. Henriques, author of the book “O Mago das Lies”, and Harry Markopolos, who tried to denounce Madoff for years, are excellent. So good that they have already inspired an HBO film and a documentary of their own, respectively.

The excerpts from Madoff’s testimony after being arrested are also a positive point of the series, but they are so little used (compared to the actor in the wig smoking a cigar) that it seems like a waste of material.

For those who don’t know Madoff’s story and have never had contact with anything produced about her, some of these problems even turn into an asset: the series is really didactic —although a pyramid scheme doesn’t have such a complicated functioning— and manages not to be boring when explaining the intricacies of the financial market.

The really unforgivable flaw of documentary is realizing that it got the story wrong. Overcoming all cheap psychology, Berlinger gets to the point when he deals with the responsibility of regulatory agencies, other financial institutions and the dynamics of Wall Street itself for Madoff to get where he has.

When the series finally starts to address this system, leaving aside the cartoonish villain a little, you realize the opportunity missed by Berlinger. He invested in the wrong narrative.

How did Madoff manage to operate for so many years? How did the SEC (the US Securities and Exchange Commission) come so close to catching him, more than once, and still let him get away? How could a bank account that supported a pyramid worth more than $60 billion not get JPMorgan’s attention? Why does the legislation allow part of the victims of fraud to be themselves responsible for repaying the other party?

These are difficult questions that the documentary asks, but answers poorly. Had that been the approach from the beginning, the result could have been different. And relevant.

As impressive as Madoff’s story itself is, it is not unique. Since its demise in 2008, caught up in the global financial crisis, scandals involving billionaire frauds have grown.

In Brazil, for example, the R$ 20 billion in “accounting inconsistencies” by Americanas is the topic of the moment. The answers to understand how it was possible for one of the largest retailers in the country, supposedly supervised by all the “guardians of the market”, to reach this point, should not be so far from the same ones explained by Madoff.

At least the losers we know they have in common: the small investor.