The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The primary purpose of the SEC is to enforce the law against market manipulation.
The Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis in the United States that began a major depression, which lasted until the mid-1840s. Profits, prices, and wages dropped, westward expansion was stalled, unemployment rose, and pessimism abounded.
In the United States, bankruptcy is largely governed by federal law, commonly referred to as the "Bankruptcy Code" ("Code"). The United States Constitution authorizes Congress to enact "uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States". Congress has exercised this authority several times since 1801, including through adoption of the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978, as amended, codified in Title 11 of the United States Code and the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA).
A financial crisis is any of a broad variety of situations in which some financial assets suddenly lose a large part of their nominal value. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many financial crises were associated with banking panics, and many recessions coincided with these panics. Other situations that are often called financial crises include stock market crashes and the bursting of other financial bubbles, currency crises, and sovereign defaults. Financial crises directly result in a loss of paper wealth but do not necessarily result in significant changes in the real economy.
Jean Tirole is a French economist who is currently a professor of economics at Toulouse 1 Capitole University. He focuses on industrial organization, game theory, banking and finance, and psychology. In particular, he focuses on the regulation of economic activity in a way that does not hinder innovation while maintaining fair rules.
Theodore Ropp (1911–2000) was an American historian who served as a professor at Duke University.
Janet Roitman is an American anthropologist. She is the co-founder of the Platform Economies Research Network. Roitman is a professor at RMIT University, an Associate Investigator with the Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), and co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre. She is also a member of the Council of Advisors for the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, New York.
Bernard Lawrence Madoff was an American financial criminal and financier who was the admitted mastermind of the largest known Ponzi scheme in history, worth an estimated $65 billion. He was at one time chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange. Madoff's firm had two basic units: a stock brokerage and an asset management business; the Ponzi scheme was centered in the asset management business.
Jacob Ezra Merkin is an American investor, hedge fund manager and philanthropist. He had been a fund manager and capital raiser until 2008 when one of the funds in Gabriel Capital LP, his $5 billion group of hedge funds became insolvent because a large portion of its assets was invested with the convicted Ponzi scheme operator Bernard Madoff. The fallout from his investment with Madoff has been extensive. He navigated a series of lawsuits without a finding of fraud or knowledge of the scheme, but agreed to repay any fees earned from the investment in Madoff historically. He had to resign a series of positions including his role as non-executive chairman of GMAC.
The Madoff investment scandal was a major case of stock and securities fraud discovered in late 2008. In December of that year, Bernie Madoff, the former Nasdaq chairman and founder of the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
William Kurt Black is an American lawyer, academic, author, and a former bank regulator. Black's expertise is in white-collar crime, public finance, regulation, and other topics in law and economics. He developed the concept of "control fraud", in which a business or national executive uses the entity he or she controls as a "weapon" to commit fraud.
Participants in the Madoff investment scandal included employees of Bernard Madoff's investment firm with specific knowledge of the Ponzi scheme, a three-person accounting firm that assembled his reports, and a network of feeder funds that invested their clients' money with Madoff while collecting significant fees. Madoff avoided most direct financial scrutiny by accepting investments only through these feeder funds, while obtaining false auditing statements for his firm. The liquidation trustee of Madoff's firm has implicated managers of the feeder funds for ignoring signs of Madoff's deception.
The recovery of funds from the Madoff investment scandal has been underway since the scandal broke in December 2008. That month, recovery trustee Irving Picard received funds from the Bank of New York account where Bernard Madoff held new investments into his Ponzi scheme. As it has been concluded that no legitimate investments were made on the investors' behalf for at least the last 12 years of operation, recovery has proceeded on a "money in/money out" basis. Investors are entitled to receive no more than the nominal cash amounts that they paid in and did not subsequently withdraw, without regard to inflation, interest, opportunity cost or the false statements that Madoff provided them. Those statements combined to a total balance of approximately $64 billion, while the admitted claims amount to $19.5 billion. As of March 2024, the trustee had recovered $14.7 billion toward these claims through legal action against Madoff associates, feeder funds and beneficiaries of the scheme, and had made fifteen distributions to investors. Action by the Department of Justice has recovered an additional $4 billion.
Stanley Chais was an American investment advisor, money manager, and philanthropist. He operated "feeder funds" which collected money for funds related to the Madoff investment scandal. The widow, family, and estate of Chais settled with Madoff trustee Irving Picard in 2016 for $277 million.
Kristin Anne Goss is an American political scientist. She is the Susan B. King Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She specializes in the politics of gun control, advocacy by women's organizations, the formation of political movements, philanthropy and public policy, and civic engagement in the United States.
Kent Worcester is an American political scientist, historian, comics critic, and songwriter. His work deals with popular culture, intellectual history, trade unions, and social democracy. He has written extensively on comics and graphic novels and wrote a biography of C. L. R. James, the West Indian intellectual, among many other publications.
Karen L. "Kerry" Abrams is an American law professor and academic administrator. She currently serves as the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the Duke University School of Law.
Benjamin Rathbun was an American entrepreneur from Buffalo, New York. He was born in the area of Westford, Connecticut. His family had settled in New York from Connecticut. Before entering real estate, his Eagle Tavern served those who were traveling between Buffalo and Albany. In the 19th century, he built out the city's central business district and many other areas of the city, totaling hundreds of buildings. These included a fourteen-floor warehouse, dozens of low-rise buildings, a hotel, and nearly three dozen private dwellings. His investors were looking to capitalize on the explosive growth of Buffalo after the Erie Canal was finished. Rathbun drew inspiration from Alexander Hamilton and implemented vertical integration into his business model. He began to operate a quarry, brickyards, and machine shops. He would also hire his own architects, shipping personnel, and other tradesmen to help see his projects to completion. By 1836, Rathbun's projects under construction had a collective value of $5.5 million. His reputation led to him opening his own bank, with banknotes displaying his signature as "B. Rathbun". Rathbun's plans for more projects, including a Buffalo Exchange building, were halted prior to the Panic of 1837—he was later jailed for forged endorsements in 1836. This crisis led to mass unemployment in the lodging, education and banking sectors, which relied on his company's fortunes to succeed. Rathbun died on July 20, 1873.
Michael J. Kaufman is an American legal scholar who is the Dean and a Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law. He previously served as Dean of Loyola University Chicago School of Law, where he also held several administrative positions at Loyola University Chicago, including Acting Provost and Chief Academic Officer and Vice Provost for Academic Strategy. His research and teaching focuses on education law, equity, policy, and pedagogy; securities regulation and litigation; and civil procedure and dispute resolution.
