The Wizard of Lies
***1/2
I have discovered the most suspicious sentence in the English language:
“I am a Money Manager; give me your money.”
Money Managers are charlatans.
“I am an expert at investing,” he says. Of course he isn’t, though.
You already know for certain that the Money Manager isn’t actually great at investing. If he was, he would be wealthy already and wouldn’t need to be wasting his time conning you.
“The stock market is complicated,” he says. “You can’t do it yourself!” Of course you can, though.
I have a brief project for you: Go to www.cnbc.com and search for three companies. Any three…I’ll give you a few minutes…
Welcome back. Did you notice how those random companies have gone up during the past year? And during the past 5 years. And 10 years.
Stocks go up. People in the market make money. It’s pretty sweet. You don’t need a snake oil salesman in a suit to make your money grow. You can do it yourself.
In the end, a person who is thinking of giving her life savings to a Money Manager needs to ask herself one question: who does she trust more: herself? Or the Money Manager?
“The Wizard of Lies” answers that question emphatically.
The HBO film chronicles one gut-wrenching year in the life America’s most famous Money Manager: Bernie Madoff.
Thousands of people trusted Madoff (Robert DeNiro) with their life savings. These people thought they were wealthy and smart. It turns out they were only wealthy. Soon they were neither.
Bernie Madoff conned chumps into giving him $65 billion. They thought that Madoff was a master investor who had figured out how to make double-digit gains even during Bear Markets.
Madoff was a master of the Ponzi scheme. He made rich dupes eager to fork over their fortune. And instead of investing the money, he just kept it. He sent his clients statements showing how much profit Madoff had made them. But the financial statements were lies. They really had nothing.
Director Barry Levinson argues that Bernie Madoff had nothing, too. Sure, he had piles of other people’s money. But the cost of his wealth was a gigantic secret that he had to keep from his family.
Lying was Bernie Madoff’s greatest skill. By systemically lying to his wife and children to keep them from being accessories to his crimes, lying became Madoff’s greatest virtue. Ultimately, he succeeded.
It can be argued that Bernie Madoff was a good father. He provided for his family. His sons weren’t arrested after the Ponzi scheme was uncovered, even though they had been working in Madoff’s firm for decades.
Bernie Madoff saved his sons from prison. He couldn’t protect them from the media, however. The horror of “The Wizard of Lies” isn’t the many super wealthy people who messed up and became less wealthy; it is the one American family that got torn apart by scandal.
De Niro’s Bernie Madoff says that it is no coincidence that he was arrested just as the 2008 financial meltdown hit. He claims that he is just a scapegoat for a broken system.
And he has a point. In the end, what did Madoff really accomplish? He took wealth from millionaires and billionaires and redistributed it – not unlike that other old guy named Bernie wants to do.
Meanwhile, what were Madoff’s clients expecting? They were looking for him to pick stocks in a rigged market where the investor always wins and the American worker always loses.
“The Wizard of Lies” dares to ask the question. Was Bernie Madoff a thieving sociopath? Or was he a Money Manager?