Holman Jenkins, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has a novel solution to the Madoff affair:
[Madoff] may have been casual from the start about what money he used to pay withdrawals. It is almost inconceivable, though, that he could have built a true Ponzi scheme to a height of $50 billion, in which there were never any real assets, just his superhuman 40-year juggling act to ensure new investors were recruited as needed to provide funds to meet withdrawal requests from earlier investors. If so, he is a genius who should immediately be put in charge
of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.