Would that the great Charles Kindleberger were alive to revel in the latest disaster. The author of Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Kindleberger mapped out the immutable trajectory of bubbles and crashes repeated numerous times at least since the 1600s.

Let's grant that Bernard Madoff, who allegedly lost $50 billion of his clients' dough, has been convicted yet of no crime. But the Madoff episode looks to be fulfilling the Kindleberger prophecy of bursting bubbles in the same way Enron and WorldCom did after the 1990s bubble. To wit, says Kindleberger:

"The imploson of an asset price bubble always leads to the discovery of fraud and swindles."

Surely this is only the beginning of these kinds of revelations. Get to work, prosecutors!