Does Madoff's Life Begin Today?

Rogue financier Bernard Madoff is expected to plead guilty today to operating a vast decades-long fraud, and details of his elaborate international Ponzi scheme continue to emerge. The Wall Street Journal leads its coverage today with details that Madoff used his London office to launder cash in a type of carousel trade, "transferring client money from the investment-advisory business in New York to London and then back to the U.S. to support the U.S. trading operation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, and also for his personal benefit and for family members and associates." The revelation means British authorities have opened up an investigation of their own into the alleged fraudster's dealings, the newspaper adds.

According to the New York Times, after today's plea hearing in federal court, "there is a strong chance that [Madoff] will not return home." The most suspenseful moment today will come after the plea, the newspaper writes, when Madoff's attorneys will argue that the judge ought to preserve his $10 million bail agreement and let him resume living in his penthouse apartment rather than wait out the next few weeks (or few months) until he's sentenced behind bars. He may be guilty of running the largest financial fraud in history, BusinessWeek notes, but does a potential life sentence for Madoff fit the crime? The magazine talks to a variety of trial attorneys, and their verdict is not heartening for Madoff. "For any kind of business crime, any kind of fraud, judges are much tougher on offenders at sentencing in an environment like this," Alan Ellis, a San Francisco attorney, tells BusinessWeek. "They sense the public outcry." Another attorney, though, counters that we won't be seeing a repeat of the French Revolution.

Thanks to the Madoff case and the multiplying mini-Madoff frauds that have emerged since the markets started souring, financial fraudsters and bad bankers are now fast becoming the new Public Enemy No. 1. And to fight this war on financial terror, prosecutors will be getting more resources, the NYT writes, as the Obama administration focuses more attention on stabilizing the banks and restoring confidence in the sector. The "proposed [federal] budget contains hints that it will add to this weight of litigation, including money for more F.B.I. agents to investigate mortgage fraud and white-collar crime, and a 13 percent raise for the Securities and Exchange Commission," the newspaper writes. Not surprisingly, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal tells the NYT that new Attorney General Eric Holder is advocating a "zero tolerance for mortgage fraud."

One attorney general who will welcome added resources no doubt is New York's Andrew Cuomo. Yesterday, Cuomo kept up the heat on Merrill Lynch's top brass over last year's $4 billion bonus payout. In a new court filing, Cuomo says, "Merrill Lynch misled a congressional committee about the timing of its decision to move up the payment of 2008 bonuses to December, just days before the company was acquired by Bank of America," the Financial Times writes. Cuomo is once again putting pressure on Bank of America to release details of which Merrill execs got bonuses on the eve of the merger, the newspaper writes.

Remember how the banks were too big to fail? Where does that leave the nation's life insurers, which the WSJ calls "an important cog" in the economy whose "mounting losses weaken the companies' capital and erode investor confidence"? As the industry receives a collective pummeling on Wall Street (the Dow Jones Wilshire U.S. life insurance index has dropped 59 percent since the beginning of the year), some dozen life insurers are waiting to hear whether they will receive aid from the government's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. If folks aren't fretting over their life insurance policies, it's probably because they're worrying about their mortgage payments. New figures from RealtyTrac, the online marketer of foreclosed properties, shows that more than 74,000 homes were lost to bank repossessions in February, a 6 percent jump on January's figures and a 30 percent increase from just a year before. The figures are of particular concern as they come after many big banks and mortgage lenders had imposed a foreclosure moratorium. It appears that, for many borrowers, "once they go into default, they never get out despite moratorium efforts," writes CNN Money.

The Roche-Genentech dalliance has a happy ending. The WSJ reports that the Swiss Big Pharma giant has "sealed a friendly deal" with the California biotech company to buy the 44 percent of the company that it doesn't already own for around $46.8 billion. The agreement, the second Big Pharma merger in a week, comes after months of wooing and was finally agreed to after Roche raised its offer price to $95 a share. The current economic climate has prompted a rush to merge within the pharmaceutical sector as many companies are viewed as undervalued after taking a beating during the last year. Roche was particularly keen to close this deal this month because it feared that an anticipated positive result of a trial of Genentech’s Avastin cancer drug—due out in April—could drive up the price, Bloomberg reports. “Genentech is [Roche's] best asset. They had to get this done before the Avastin data came out,” one analyst tells Bloomberg.

It's that time of year again, when Forbes publishes its list of the world's most fabulously rich and influential. Never mind that there are some 330 fewer billionaires this year on the Forbes list, as the Houston Chronicle points out. Forbes would like to note that 72 moguls are single. And, presumably, a good number are looking for that someone special. "Of those [72] plutocrats, 21 are perennial bachelors while the other 51 are divorcées yearning for a new chance at love," the magazine writes. The list includes, the magazine continues, moguls like Michael Bloomberg and Oprah Winfrey. There's no mention in the article of the most recent soon-to-be-divorced mogul, 85-year-old Sumner Redstone.