For example, Henry Markopolos spent nearly a decade attempting to expose the billion-dollar Madoff Ponzi Scheme.
Under pressure from his employers to replicate Mr Madoff's returns, Mr Markopolos tried to pick apart his strategy.
ECONOMIST: A handful of outsiders come out of the crisis in credit
Ask Harry Markopolos about what else he could have done to get the SEC to go after Madoff.
FORBES: AXA Fined $100,000 For Not Axing Ponzi Broker Sooner
Casey challenged Markopolos to use the statements to reverse-engineer the investment model that could produce such extraordinary results.
Harry Markopolos, who was sitting in the audience, is particularly interested in this.
Markopolos complained to the SEC for years about Madoff, but was ignored.
Mr Markopolos offers a simple explanation for this failure: incompetence and arrogance.
ECONOMIST: A handful of outsiders come out of the crisis in credit
Mr Markopolos's book is nowhere nearly as well written as Mr Lewis's, but the frustration of the outsider could not be better expressed.
ECONOMIST: A handful of outsiders come out of the crisis in credit
Harry Markopolos earned the national spotlight as the lone whistleblower who doggedly pursued Bernie Madoff and tried with all his might to get the attention of, well, anyone.
Even though other observers wondered how he could have handled the trading Madoff claimed, no one ever sought to out him until Markopolos wrote the SEC in 2000.
FORBES: The Card Sharp Who Cottoned Onto Madoff's Fraud In 1991
The story of how Mr Markopolos discovered the world's largest Ponzi scheme is interesting enough, but the real meat of his account concerns the investigations that did not happen.
ECONOMIST: A handful of outsiders come out of the crisis in credit
This discovery was a full decade before Boston whistle blower Harry Markopolos came to the same conclusion and tried unsuccessfully to alert the SEC and the media as to the huge Ponzi scheme.
FORBES: The Card Sharp Who Cottoned Onto Madoff's Fraud In 1991
The movie, written and directed by Jeff Prosserman, clumsily walks Markopolos through actions that he took years ago, but the rueful man at the center of the film remains an object of fascination.
As Mr Markopolos and a small, informal team began to dig, it became clear that billions of dollars were being channelled to Mr Madoff, yet there was no trace of his transactions in the market.
ECONOMIST: A handful of outsiders come out of the crisis in credit
Within five minutes, Markopolos sensed that the returns had to be fictional, and he became sure of it when he plotted on a graph the rising quarterly gains, year after year, and wound up with a virtually straight forty-five-degree angle.
In his book No One Would Listen, the whistle-blower Harry Markopolos observed that a revolving door has existed between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Wall Street, with inexperienced employees expecting to spend a few years as regulators and then move to much more lucrative jobs on Wall Street with the firms they were regulating.
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