the misdeeds of which she was convicted -- misleading government investigators -- were less than penny-ante compared to the multi-billion dollar frauds that first built up and then destroyed giant companies such as Enron and WorldCom . Along with Madoff , the Securities and Exchange Commission is being portrayed as the villain of the piece , having failed to catch him long ago when his alleged depredations must have been much smaller . Instead , it gave him a few wrist slaps until he confessed his misdeeds a month ago . But , tips from Boston money manager Harry Markopoulos over the years notwithstanding , it 's not at all surprising that the SEC missed Madoff . In fact , I 'd have been amazed if the SEC had been the ones to catch him . Why ? I do n't want to seem cynical or jaded , but after almost 40 years of covering business news , I 've seen the same thing happen over and over because of the way regulators are trained . If someone runs a little bit out of the baseline by chiseling on numbers or playing some other game , regulators are pretty good
NEW YORK -LRB- CNN -RRB- -- When stock markets are soaring , people think they 're making money because they 're geniuses . But when the market tanks -- which it always does , sooner or later -- people look for villains to blame for their losses . Allan Sloan says the real lesson of the Madoff case is not to rely on others to protect your investments . That brings us to Bernie Madoff , who has become the iconic symbol of the current horrible market and economic meltdown , even though he really had nothing to do with it . Yes , Madoff sure seems to be a really , really bad guy who ruined lots and lots of lives and should probably be locked up for the rest of his natural days . But Madoff 's misdeeds -- or as our lawyers would prefer , his alleged misdeeds -- have nothing to do with the market meltdown that has sliced trillions of dollars from our collective net worth . He 's become the symbol of the current meltdown the same way that uber-tastemaker Martha Stewart became a face of the 2001-02 corporate crime wave , even though