Bernie Madoff in Des Moines dollars
June 29, 2009 by James
Filed under Business, Economics, Guest Writer: Lindberg, James G., In the News, Iowa, Law, Life is Political
By his own admission Bernie Madoff engaged in criminal acts using $65 billion of other people’s money. He lost it.
How much is $65 billion in Des Moines dollars?
The median annual household income in Polk County is under $55,000.
If the average Polk County family worked 1 million years, they would still be $10 billion short.
You say you don’t have a million years? Enlist your friends. There are about 150,000 households. If every man, woman, and child in Polk County pooled their income for about 8 years, we could match the $65 billion.
That’s one perspective on the crime: Bernie Madoff took the equivalent of 8 years of labor of every man, woman, child in Polk County, Iowa.
I wonder where his thinking went wrong.
photo by flickr by Steve Rhodes of a painting by Yan Pei Ming
