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At the end of Bernie Madoff's plea for leniency Monday morning, he turned to his victims and said, "I'm sorry, I know that doesn't help you."

Or at least that's how I wrote it down in my notebook. The New York Times originally posted it as: "I'm sorry. I know that doesn't help you."

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke came under fire this week for allegedly forcing Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch. Bank of America (BAC) had attempted to wrestle out of the deal, reportedly citing something called a material adverse change clause in the acquisition.

Brad DeLong excerpted mostly today. Starting with a report from Ali Frick at ThinkProgress, DeLong came out fighting, accusing conservatives of "waste, fraud, and abuse." The issue at hand is Republican rancor over production cuts of F-22s (a $2 billion fighter jet), the result of the Obama administration's defense budget trimmings.

Brad DeLong trounces ABC and Fortune on their coverage of the health care reform debate in a game of "he said, she said." The news outlets parroted squawks of opposition from Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Lindsey Graham, respectively, about burgeoning cost estimates for a public-option plan, DeLong suggests.

Situations with systemic risk suggest a coming event in which several different financial institutions threaten to bring on a worldwide collapse. A-No. 1 on Obama's new financial regulatory agenda this week was finding a way to manage systemic risk. So why is assessing systemic risk such a huge priority in financial regulation?

This week, TBM contributor Mark Gimein took on Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and master of "the highly improbable." Gimein argued that Taleb's brand of "catastrophism" is impractical for most investors, who can't afford to "wait around for the unexpected."

Brad DeLong compared the economic projections that shaped the size and scope of the stimulus package with the data on how the economy has actually changed (read: shrunk) over the forecast period. He wrote a long comment on the subject, the main point being that the stimulus package is actually conservative relative to what we now know about the scale of the crisis and the Fed lacks the means to address it.

The housing crisis, Lehman's collapse, the abject failure of American car companies—over and over, pundits, politicians, and taxpayers have asked: Isn't there any way we could have predicted this? Of course, business journalists have made mighty fine punching bags throughout this crisis—and perhaps rightly so. Who could forget Jon Stewart's epic takedown of Rick Santelli and the CNBC-ers, who had assured us all was fine and well?

Paul Krugman started his day pointing out a disturbing trend: economists and commentators who "have been reinventing old fallacies"—economic ideas that were actually thought up decades ago and have already been proven false.

Longtime readers of TBM have probably encountered the 1931 financial diaries of Benjamin Roth, a lawyer in Youngstown, Ohio.

This week, the New York Times' Eric Dash and Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal both referred to Citigroup (C) as "a ward of the state." In an item from the Wall Street Journal's opinion page, the same language was used to describe General Motors. What's a "ward of the state," anyway?

Brad DeLong, spent the day like a true member of the media: commenting on the media. He lambasted a couple of NY Times op-eds, and pined over the incompetence of the press corps. DeLong was conflicted over today's NY Times report on the deficit. He liked it but wished it had broken the trillion-dollar number down into buckets of good-deficit and bad-deficit. Or at least normal-deficit and abnormal-deficit.