Quote-Unquote

''By and large in today’s regulatory environment, it’s virtually impossible to violate rules. This is something that the public really doesn’t understand. If you read things in the newspaper and you see somebody violate a rule, you say well, they’re always doing this. But it’s impossible for a violation to go undetected, certainly not for a considerable period of time. And when you consider the volumes of trading, the trillions of dollars of trading that go on today in Wall Street—I mean, our firm, for example, we trade an excess of $1 trillion dollars a year and that’s one firm—and you look at what we would consider to be the infractions, they’re relatively small, primarily because of all the regulation.''

-Hedgefunder, and former Nasdaq chairman, Bernard Madoff, during a panel discussion in October, 2007. Madoff was arrested yesterday for perpetrating a massive $50 billion fraud- essentially using the money of new investors in his exclusive hedge fund to pay high ''returns'' to older investors, or as he called it, ''a big lie'' and a ''Ponzi scam''. He was turned in by his sons.