There are some events that seem to bring great events to a head; back in September we thought the peak of the credit crunch was the collapse of Lehman Brothers but now (and it may not be the peak of course) it looks like the extraordinary Bernie Madoff scandal. Madoff, it would appear, made off with $50bn of investors' money in a giant Ponzi scam, paying investors out of the deposits of newly-recruited investors. And all the money has supposedly disappeared, apart from Bernie's bulging bank balance of course. But Bernie, although he had enough to be a member of just about every fancy East Coast golf club and to split his time between Manhattan and Palm Beach, doesn't have $50bn of it, that would make him as rich as Bill Gates. So where's it gone? Anyone armed with a pin and a copy of the Wall Street Journal would have been hard-pressed not to make some money at least over the past decade as stock markets across the world boomed. Not as much as Madoff, with his ten per cent plus returns every single year, pretended he made but money all the same. It seems inconceivable that Madoff's army of traders could have lost every cent. So has it really all disappeared? After all, there was no huge run on Madoff funds by investors; quite a lot of them withdrew money as the credit crunch sharpened but a hell of a lot of them left it in, as is becoming all too apparent. But Madoff was unmasked when he told his sons there was no more money left. Somehow or other it doesn't quite stack up.