To the editor:

I'm puzzled to explain to myself the difference between Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme that lured naive pension fund operators and others in business to invest the money they were entrusted with in a scheme that was paying suspiciously high rates of interest and the federal Ponzi scheme that was passionately supported by economists Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers?

So if Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in jail for his private Ponzi scheme, how come Greenspan, Rubin and Summers have not been charged for their part in the frauds made possible by the deregulated economy they so passionately defended and favored, and that allowed banks all over the world to gamble their funds on derivatives they didn't understand and subprime mortgages and they allowed to be rated AAA in order to attract greedy buyers with impossibly high interest rates of 30 percent or more?

Belatedly, the PBS show "Frontline" ran an hourlong show called "The Warning," which revealed how Greenspan, Rubin and Summers used their power to persuade Congress not to institute curbs that could have prevented the crash of the Wall Street casino market economy.

President Barack Obama promised to put regulatory legislation in place similar to what had been proposed many years before the crash. But it appears he has yielded to the pressure of corporate lobbyists and given cabinet status to a couple of market economy Wall Street types, like Summers and Timothy Geithner to deal with problems they helped create.

Paul Brailsford

Ipswich