Dr Doom of Wall St is big loser with Madoff
Top Wall Street economist, Henry Kaufman, dubbed Dr Doom for his bearish predictions, has emerged as a big loser in the Bernard Madoff scandal.
He is said to have lost "several million dollars" of his personal investments with the alleged Ponzi scheme.
Kaufman, 81, had invested with Madoff for more than five years. He is famed in the US and Europe for gloomy predictions in the 1970s and 1980s on interest rates and bond prices. He was a director of Lehman Brothers and chairman of Lehman board's finance and risk committee before Lehman's collapse.
There is growing speculation that another casualty of the scandal could be the watchdog Securities and Exchange Commission itself - criticised for failing to uncover the $50 billion (£34.63 billion) fraud.
The SEC faces an uncertain future in 2009. Some officials have suggested reassigning its responsibilities to other agencies, or merging it with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Madoff affair is the latest public relations disasters for the SEC, which is seen as having done too little to avert or deal with the market meltdown.
SEC chairman Christopher Cox and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson have appeared to endorse combining the SEC with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Whatever the fate of the SEC, Congress plans a regulatory overhaul after the financial crisis . Cox said earlier this week the SEC will conduct an internal probe on "deeply troubling" revelations it failed to act for almost a decade on "credible and specific allegations" of wrongdoing by Madoff.
The scandal threatens to wipe out small Austrian private bank, Bank Medici. The Austrian government is poised to take it over after Peter Scheithauer, its chief executive, confirmed clients of the bank, which had $3.6 billion assets, had invested $2.1 billion in two funds run by Madoff.
Madoff faces a deadline today in New York to tell prosecutors how much he owns and where the assets are. A federal bankruptcy judge overseeing his firm's liquidation has approved a transfer of $28.1 million from one of his bank accounts to the court-appointed trustee, to be held against customers' claims.
HSBC, BNP Paribas, Santander, and Fortis have had losses from exposure to Madoff but no bank has collapsed
