Madoff and friends

Add Bernard Madoff to the list of those who suspected that hedge funds and banks knew what he was up to, but decided to wink at his Ponzi scheme.

"They had to know. But the attitude was sort of, 'If you're doing something wrong, we don't want to know,'" Madoff said in his first public interview since his arrest in December 2008.

Madoff is serving a 150-year prison sentence for perpetrating arguably the largest Ponzi scheme ever, which The New York Times said lost $20 billion in cash and $65 billion in paper wealth. In the meantime, Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee assigned to recover assets for victims, has filed "hundreds of lawsuits" in seeking to recover about $90 billion from select investors who profited handsomely from the scheme, including his bank JPMorgan Chase, which earned lucrative fees dealing with Madoff and Viennese financier Sonja Kohn, allegedly a key figure in several hedge funds that channeled investments to Madoff's firm over a 16-year period in which Madoff and friends were scamming investors.

Still playing the game, Madoff told the Times he cooperated with Picard during four days of interviews last summer in the trustee's effort to recover funds for victims, but would not cross what he likely perceives as a delicate line in the sand, refusing to help implicate anyone in a criminal investigation.

It's all very wink-wink, ha-ha. Madoff is trying to say, "Here's your money back," but like a teenager with a puzzled look on his face, when the dime bag is found in his underwear drawer, he's trying to say, "I don't have any idea how it got there."

Finance frequently works on that premise -- the multimillion dollar settlements with the Securities and Exchange Commission that claim, at the bottom of the page, that Bank of America or Goldman Sachs "admits to no wrongdoing," as they cough up a settlement that is less than the amount stolen. It's just a cost of doing business. One can't imagine a lawyer who doesn't love this stuff.

But someone else ought to go to jail.

Madoff's accountant David Friehling and a staff member in his firm Frank DiPascali have pleaded guilty in the case, yet Madoff continues to insist he acted alone. He may as well insist he's Babe Ruth or a reincarnated George Washington. He had help, pure and simple. There isn't much room for debate about that.

In international markets Wednesday, the Nikkei 225 index in Japan rose 0.57 percent, while the Shanghai composite index in China rose 0.85 percent. The Hang Seng index in Hong Kong added 1.12 percent, while the Sensex in India rose 0.15 percent.

In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 index was flat, dropping 0.02 percent.

In midday trading in Europe, the FTSE 100 index in Britain rose 0.62 percent, while the DAX 30 in Germany gained 0.2 percent. The CAC 40 in France added 0.92, while the Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.28 percent.