And the same bailout principle designed to save Detroit's unions by bankrolling management might be applied in this case. Just bail out Mr. Madoff's Ponzi scheme until the economy improves, and it becomes self-funding again.
Why not? For decades, every government in the Western world has been using current revenues to pay health, unemployment, old-age, and every other kind of "insurance" and "pension" entitlement. This is the core financial principle of the welfare state. It is a Ponzi scheme on a scale vastly beyond even Bernard Madoff's imaginings. But instead of having the people who conceived and executed this scheme arrested, we have honoured them as great humanitarians and "progressives."
The authors of what is actually the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world have needed a constantly growing population, earning constantly more dollars per head, being constantly inflated (both the dollars and the heads), to keep their scheme running.