Oh look, someone still wants to go soft on white-collar criminals.

Day 582

Seems reasonable to me. Madoff gets 2.3 years for each billion dollars of the estimated $65 billion (U.S.) in fictitious assets his gullible clients believed he held for them. 

The Globe's Christie Blatchford ("Madoff's no murderer") begs to differ. I expect that's less because of any sympathy for Madoff, than her view that super-max sentences should be reserved for her bread and butter, which is killers, child molesters and so on.

Thing is, Madoff and the moral cripples on Wall Street who looted the global financial system of trillions of dollars are murderers, at least indirectly. If Blatchford is unaware of the spike in suicides among foreclosed-upon homeowners and blue-collar workers suddenly made jobless by employers driven to the wall in the credit drought, she hasn't been reading the papers.

Related

* Guardian/AP: Waiting for the next Madoff scandal.

For the purposes of this blog, the inception of the Great Recession in the U.S., the epicentre of the crisis, is taken as the start date for the global slump. The U.S. has been in recession since December 2007.