Madoff investment scandal to enable the Irish regulator to uncover the fraud much earlier than late 2008 when he was finally arrested in New York. The scheme began to unravel in the fall of 2008, when the general market downturn accelerated. Madoff had previously come close to collapse in the second half of 2005 after Bayou Group, a group of hedge funds, was exposed as a Ponzi scheme that used a bogus accounting firm to misrepresent its performance. By November, investors had requested $105 million in redemptions, though Madoff's Chase account only had $13 million. Madoff only survived by moving money from his
Global financial crisis in December 2008 the last six months of 2008. Global financial crisis in December 2008 On December 1, the National Bureau of Economic Research officially declared that the U.S. economy had entered recession in December 2007, a full year earlier. (See late 2000s recession) The Labor Department said that the US lost 533,000 jobs in November 2008, the biggest monthly loss since 1974. This raised the unemployment rate from 6.5% to 6.7%. On December 9, the Bank of Canada lowered its key interest rate by 0.75% to 1.5%, the lowest it had been since 1958; at the same time the Bank officially announced