After hearing Mr. Markopolos’s talk, Mr. Einhorn said it tracked with his suspicions, too.
That was all the encouragement Mr. Markopolos needed.
Bridgewater, he wrote to the S.E.C., was a Ponzi scheme.
Bridgewater was not a Ponzi scheme.
Which is not to say that all was as Mr. Dalio so often described it.
The S.E.C. and other regulators dutifully took meetings with Mr. Markopolos and his team. The whistle-blowers’ report was passed through the organization, and a team at the agency looked into it. (The S.E.C. declined to comment.)
According to a person briefed on the investigation, what they concluded, in part, was that the world’s biggest hedge fund used a complicated sequence of financial machinations — including relatively hard-to-track trading instruments — to make otherwise straightforward-seeming investments. It made sense to the S.E.C. that rivals couldn’t track them.
Satisfied, the S.E.C. stopped responding to requests from Mr. Markopolos and his crew for updates. Regulators raised no public accusations about Bridgewater. Mr. Markopolos moved on.
Source: How Does the World’s Largest Hedge Fund Really Make Its Money? – The New York Times
