Tonight:
5°c
Bernard Madoff must hope that, by pleading guilty, he draws a veil over his frauds.
That must be the only explanation for his behaviour. It's not like he is going to get a shorter sentence that will make any difference to him - he is 70 years old and he will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in jail.
His bluff should be called: the investigation must continue because there are gaping holes in the Madoff affair.
We're led to believe he acted entirely alone, that he created false tickets for investments he never made, to cover up his giant Ponzi scheme - using money from some investors to make payments to others.
Impossible. While Madoff was a control freak and obsessed with detail, nobody can keep a handle on a scam of such magnitude and complexity.
Prosecutors say the US government is trying to recover up to $170 billion (£121 billion) in assets from Madoff which, they say, is equal to all the money that ran through accounts linked to the scheme.
He is thought to have cost his clients $50 billion (the widely published figure for his clients' losses). If so, what did he do with all that money?
One theory is that he blew it, gambling on the markets. But traders have a shrewd idea if someone is posting large losses.
Every trade has a counterparty - with every buy or sell order, there is someone on the other side. However, Madoff never crossed their radar.
Or he invested the cash in traditional securities - in which case he wasn't wiped out. He may have had a bad 2008 - he finally broke down about his "big lie" to his sons at the end of the year - but the Dow did not fall that much.
Over the 12 months prior to his arrest it was off more than 30% - a significant drop but nowhere near a total wipeout. Likewise, property has slumped - yet it has not crashed completely.
Another theory is that he spent it on himself. In which case, on what? His lifestyle was lavish but it was not that lavish.
He had three homes - in Manhattan, the Hamptons and Palm Beach. Together they were worth $30 million.
The rules of his Upper East Side apartment block demand that each resident keeps $100 million liquid - so any unforeseen expenses can be met instantly.
While that seems like a vast sum and would rule out most people from living there, $100 million is still a long way short of tens of billions.
He owned yachts but they were not in the Roman Abramovich league. There is no sign of him having squandered billions on personal possessions - so far a court-appointed trustee has been able to find only about $1 billion in assets.
Another suspicion is that nobody actually lost $50 billion, that it's a gross exaggeration, dreamed up by Madoff.
He may have paid much of it back, that he consistently made payments to clients and that was one of the reasons alarm bells did not ring.
Still another is that he squirrelled it away, into secret offshore accounts. But for whose benefit? When he made his confession, he knew he was never going to access these deposits.
The recurring suspicion is that if he did, they were intended for others. Possibly for his family and anyone who helped him.
The City adage that did for Madoff's clients was that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
The same can be applied to what has been revealed so far in the case. Like the returns Madoff was promising his investors, it does not stack up.
Let Bank take its share of blame
What is the Bank of England for? In some quarters of the City, even asking that question is akin to committing blasphemy.
But listening to Sir James Sassoon, the former banker turned civil servant turned Gordon Brown's City envoy turned George Osborne's adviser on financial regulatory reform, I found myself thinking the unthinkable. Sassoon has just produced his preliminary report for the shadow chancellor, and part of the problem can be laid at the Bank's door.
While the Financial Services Authority was engaged in what Sassoon calls the "micro", or overseeing individual banks, the "macro", or bigger picture, resided with the Bank. Unfortunately, the Bank has concentrated too much on monetary policy and not enough on its supervisory function.
"It's got to be more involved with the markets again," said Sassoon of the Bank.
He went on: "The number of people employed in one of its key divisions to do with stability, for example, had been reduced from 180 to 120 and the scope of its six-monthly financial stability reports had narrowed.
"There is a lot of evidence of them pulling back from the markets, and at the wrong time. We have to get the Bank re-engaged."
That is certainly the sense I get. Much heat has been placed under the FSA - some of it directed there from those not a million miles away from the Bank and its supporters - but the watchdog could only do so much. It was not the FSA's job to ask "what if" - what if the credit bubble burst, what if the money markets froze?
It's clear that analysis was not being done, or if it was, it wasn't being conveyed to the regulators on the ground at the FSA.
The Bank betrays signs under Governor Mervyn King, himself an academic, of becoming too crowded with economists and too detached. By all means have a go at the FSA, but it is not the only institution to blame.
We still can't get the banks to play ball on borrowing
Interest rates may have plummeted but businesses still find borrowing difficult and expensive.
Base rate is 0.5%. However, three-month Libor, the rate at which banks lend to each other for three-month loans, is 1.33%. In reality, they are having to pay a bit extra on top of the 1.33%, which takes it nearer 2%.
When the banks lend to a non-bank, they're charging 5%-6% at least, plus fees. In other words, the base rate is saying one thing when what is continuing to occur in the market is quite another.
Businesses are still paying through the nose for credit, and that's if they can obtain it. For their part, the banks are resolutely refusing to play ball.
A friend told me last week how he'd stepped in to help one of his suppliers in talks with its bank. He'd got a long-term relationship with the supplier, and its creditworthiness was solid. My friend interceded with the bank and he was asked if he could provide a guarantee.
He said he could but the bank would have to pay for it. The bank sounded shocked, whereupon he asked since when was it usual practice for someone underwriting a loan not to be paid for it? They were, after all, taking the risk.
Experiences like my friend's continue to shock. We're a long way from normality.
