Financiers checking out, 3 suicides this week
January 7, 2009 – 12:59 pm
Three prominent financiers/executives have committed suicide this week, and these guys are choosing gruesome ways to go out.
Steven Good swallowed a bullet:
Real-estate executive Steven L. Good was found dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound Monday in his Jaguar in a forest preserve outside Chicago, said the Kane County Sheriff’s Department.
Mr. Good, 52 years old, was chief executive of Sheldon Good & Co., one of the nation’s largest real-estate auction firms. His father founded the company in 1965…
As chairman of the Realtors Commercial Alliance Committee, Mr. Good said last month in an industry outlook news release that market conditions were “very challenging.”
Villehuchet slit his wrists:
A French executive who invested with accused swindler Bernard Madoff was found dead in an apparent suicide on Tuesday, reportedly distraught over losing up to $1.4 billion (955 billion pounds) in client money.
Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, 65, a co-founder of money manager Access International, was found dead on the 22nd floor of a New York City office building, officials said.
He slit both wrists with box cutters, and appeared to bleed to death, according to a police source who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Adolf Merckle went with the Anna Karenina exit:
He seemed to be the epitome of the respectable German industrialist: a modest family man who strove to avoid publicity. But behind the scenes, the billionaire entrepreneur Adolf Merckle speculated and gambled away his fortune. On Monday, his body was pulled from under a train.
The 74-year-old pillar of Germany’s business community and the country’s fifth richest man committed suicide after losing millions in a high-risk stock market venture that backfired. Yesterday, his family blamed the credit crunch for his death.
And for good measure, Sonja Kohn “dropped out of sight:”
With an aggressive style that stood out in the staid world of Austrian banking even more than her bouffant red wig, Sonja Kohn made few friends gathering billions for Bernard L. Madoff from wealthy investors in Russia and across Europe.
Now, she has even fewer. Mrs. Kohn has dropped out of sight, leaving the firm she founded, Bank Medici, in the hands of Austrian regulators, who took it over last week.
Embarrassment from investing heavily with Mr. Madoff could explain wanting to disappear from public view. But another theory widely repeated by those who know Mrs. Kohn is that she may be afraid of some particularly displeased investors: Russian oligarchs whose money made up a chunk of the $2.1 billion that Bank Medici invested with Mr. Madoff.
Blame Greenspan? His “body-count” here.
Posted in credit crunch |
13 Responses to “Financiers checking out, 3 suicides this week”
I expect there will be more suicides and murder/suicides to come. One of the reasons my family and I have stayed away from my husband’s former business partner and his family, who from what we heard last is getting ready to lose it all..after years of living by equity lining alone and building an empire based on debt(last count we heard he is in over his head by about 7 million). My husband and I made the decision to not follow him on his quest for a real estate empire….when Narcissistic people find they are losing the joneses empire they have built for everyone else around them, those kind of people always seem to blame everyone else but themselves.
By sonja on Jan 7, 2009
Being reduced from a billionaire to a “mere” millionaire is enough to make anybody commit suicide;)
By shinola on Jan 7, 2009
I think they all have been killed! Either from clients or from some insider to all this. I don’t think people can be that crazy to live and work all these years just to one day end it like this. There is more to all this than we will know.
By Damian on Jan 7, 2009
Madoff learned how to do a Ponzi scheme from Social Security.
By Richard Broberg on Jan 7, 2009
Damian…you may be right…just when I begin to think I’m too paranoid, things like this make me understand I am not paranoid enough.
However, let me propose an alternative thesis. Perhaps these Masters of the Universe…the most plugged-in, knowledgeable people in the world of finance and business decided to check out, not because of their PRESENT circumstances…but what they knew to be the FUTURE circumstances, both to them, their families and THEIR COUNTRIES.
Perhaps financial and economic data sets privy to the insiders and not yet released to us little people was what tipped them over into Suicide Land.
Too paranoid perhaps…..
I’m too paranoid to think otherwise.
By Sentinel on Jan 7, 2009
when this guy merkel stepped in front of that train what secrets did he take with him. i think if he only lost 1/2 of his fortune as reported by Bloomberg and he commits suicide with 3 billion left this financial crisis must be worse than we are being told, and he knew it. the GEAB predicts that the whole economy is going to hit a brick wall in the summer of 2009 and others are starting to say it too. as i said what did a billionaire know that would drive him to suicide with 3 billion left (i guess) in the bank, something scary this way comes.
By msfaye2u on Jan 8, 2009
Sonja Kohn probably just changed the color of her wig. That’s why nobody can recognize her.
By Anthony J. Alfidi on Jan 8, 2009
One thing never taken into account is the following question:
Were these people ever really alive? Money was their life…and that is not living…it is chasing some external thing to try and find happiness. This is a futile attempt…no external thing can make one happy. In fact, nothing can “make” one happy. Happiness is something you find deep within…and then express it through the world.
These issues of suicide, money greed and so on are all symptoms…symptoms of the true disease that is out there. And that disease is looking to somone else, something else, somewhere else other than ones self and their spiritual epicenter for love, happiness and the “answers.”
So long folks, we can keep arguing this til the sun goes down and nothing will ever change until we change ourselves…not any system.
By Keith on Jan 8, 2009
As early as 2007 few publications were giving notice of the forthcoming
“financial depression” but fewer were those who paid attention.
There is always high risks in Gambling but when you gamble with someone else money it is called “investments”.
I have never seen or heard any “advisory” body using the term gambling to the practice of betting in the future outcome of a company performance.
Numbers tell the tale and is of great interest that going to the races (horse-racing) you can see and study the numbers and the tote board and your final options could bring you just as good results (and much
quicker) than watching daily for the stocks performance.
The investment “society” will never dare calling betting on races an
investment. Only they (just like religions) have the true path to “riches”
via their “investments”
We have not seen the end yet.
By jrldev on Jan 8, 2009
Many of these same folk look down their noses at the average worker who struggles daily when they should be looking at them with admiration for their fortitude and ingenuity. To keep going, despite overwhelming odds, is a quality some of the rich seem to lack.
By Frank Csorba on Jan 8, 2009
If you will get hold of a book by Carl Johan Calleman published in 2004 (and therefore likely written in 2003), you’ll find, in a short paragraph running from page 156 to 157, some reasons specifying why the year of 2008 would see
“…not only a major downturn in the capitalist economy … but more like a total collapse of the international monetary system…”
The book is titled “The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness.” If this man could predict, that far in advance, what the supposed experts in the field could not see approaching, I strongly suspect that there were deeper reasons for it than we generally know.
Laugh if you will, but laughter doesn’t explain it.
By Irv Thomas on Jan 9, 2009
I predict that we are experiencing the collapse of the US empire. This economic crisis will most likely lead to World War III. Our private banking system is currently bankrupt, and it is currently only in business due to massive public intervention. All hell will start to break loose around March 2009, and from there on, the entire world will slowly fall into a very dark abyss.
By Alberto Lopez on Jan 9, 2009
You are absolutely right! These folks ought to spend a week or 3 as a wage-slave to fully grasp just how good they still have it, even after losing millions!
By To Frank Csorba on Jan 13, 2009