Economist may be latest hurt in Madoff scheme
Wed Dec 31, 2008 6:05am GMT
(Reuters) - A prominent Wall Street economist... the latest people to have lost money on investments connected to accused swindler Bernard Madoff, according to media reports.
Economist Henry Kaufman lost several million dollars, which he had in a brokerage account with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities for more than five years, the Wall Street Journal said, citing Kaufman in an interview on Tuesday.
The president of financial consulting firm Henry Kaufman & Co said his Madoff loss was no more than a couple of percent of his entire net worth and immaterial to his financial well-being, the paper said.
Kaufman became known for correctly forecasting higher inflation and interest rates when he was chief economist with Salomon Brothers in the 1970s and 1980s, when he acquired the moniker "Doctor Doom."
"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. Power will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."
R. J. Rummel, Mass Murder and Genocide, 1994