The man behind the largest financial con of all time is playing Grinch this holiday season, decrying what he calls a lack of transparency in the financial markets, and says the growth of hedge funds is forcing market players to take outsized risks in order to earn decent returns.
In a Christmas Eve jailhouse letter to CNBC, Benard Madoff says that insider trading has been around “forever.”
“(O)ne would be led to believe that with the recent spate of insider trading prosecution that insider trading is a new development,” Madoff writes the network. “This is false. It has been present in the market forever, but rarely prosecuted. The same can be said of front running of orders.”
Madoff says markets are suffering from a “lack of transparency” created by the growth of so-called “dark pools”-arrangements outside the established stock exchanges that allow parties to trade stocks privately, with trades and prices only disclosed after the fact.