In Quasi-Defense of Ezra Merkin
If you were thinking that author Daphne Merkin would have a good deal to say about the Bernie Madoff saga—and she must considering her brother is Ezra Merkin, the man who lost $1.8 billion of investor cash as part of the scheme—you're probably going to be disappointed by her piece on Tina Brown's website The Daily Beast. Merkin offers up few specifics about the events in question (or whether her own finances were affected), although you can probably take this as a thinly-veiled defense of her embattled brother:
I, like most onlookers, don't know what to think about the whole enormous malfunctioning of it, the hype that worked until it didn't, the fudged boundaries between personal fortune and public benefaction, the Byzantine networking, the globally interconnected axes of power. But I do know that the very rich are more enraged by losing money than people with less to lose, which helps explain why some sophisticated investors insist that they're not sophisticated at all, that they've never heard of Madoff, and don’t understand how this could have happened. Of course, it seems all too easy after the fact to question the lack of accountability and the Mystery of the 17th Floor. Before the fact, everyone was happy to be in on a good thing—especially a good thing with an air of exclusivity. Hey you, you're in, you lucky dog.
