The Madoff case was utterly ridiculous.

The good part of it is that since Madoff the SEC is paying money to the whistleblowers, proportional to the money that they ultimately recover in fines. There's now even a proper industry of lawyers that will help you package the whistleblower case for the SEC.

Any of you out there seeing fraud - please help clear the system and get yourself some good retirement money!

> consider the length of time it took for the US SEC to catch up with Bernie Madoff

Because it's critical to force a negative example about the US into a negative story about Germany.

Psychologically this happens so frequently (read: in all cases) because it's a suffering relief valve, it actually makes people feel better and relieves their mental anguish, so they're quite compelled to do it. That relief is so effective it's very difficult for people to resist. It's why whataboutism is so extraordinarily popular in general.

Pretty poor analogy, since rather than just being slow to "catch up" to the fraud, the German government actively abetted it by jailing a short seller and halting any short selling of Wirecard.

Additionally, Madoff's fraud was of a private investment fund only open to higher networth SEC-accredited investors (who presumably need less protection), whereas Wirecard was publicly traded on a major exchange, where anyone could buy shares of it.