he $17.1 billion that Mr Madoff claimed to have under management earlier this year is all but gone. His alleged confession that the fraud could top $50 billion looks increasingly plausible: clients have admitted to exposures amounting to more than half that. On December 16th the head of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, which is recovering what it can for investors, said the multiple sets of accounts kept by the 70-year-old were in “complete disarray” and could take six months to sort out. It is hard to imagine a more apt end to Wall Street's worst year in decades.
The known list of victims grows longer and more star-studded by the day. Among them are prominent billionaires, including Steven Spielberg; the owner of the New York Mets baseball team; Carl Shapiro, a nonagenarian clothing magnate who may have lost $545m; thousands of wealthy retirees; and a cluster of mostly Jewish charities, some of which face closure. Dozens of supposedly sophisticated financial firms were caught out too, including banks such as Santander and HSBC, and Fairfield Greenwich, an alternative-investment specialist that had funnelled no less than $7.5 billion to Mr Madoff.
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Ground zero
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Banks need more capital
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