Madoff’s Dirty Money

Abstract:     
The Madoff Ponzi scheme was sitting on a cash hoard in excess of a billion dollars by the 1990s. Most of that money came into and stayed in the 703 account at JPMorgan Chase or it was transferred to one of eleven other bank accounts. The author uses previously unanalyzed data from the Security Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) to estimate that the balances in the JPMorgan Chase account were so large that JPMorgan Chase earned in $907 million pre-tax from the Madoff deposits at the bank from 1986 to 2008.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 23

Keywords: banks, fraud, Madoff, Money Laundering, Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes

JEL Classification: G, K

working papers series