The scheme's longevity was made possible largely through "feeder funds"—management funds that bundled moneys from other investors, poured the pooled investments into Madoff Securities for management, and thereby earned fees in the millions of dollars; individual investors often had no idea that their money was entrusted to Madoff.
In contrast to the earliest forms of money, which were commodity moneys based on items such as seashells, tobacco, and precious-metal coin, practically all contemporary money takes the form of bank money, which consists of checks or drafts that function as commercial or central bank IOUs.
Full-fledged banks did not emerge until medieval times, with the formation of organizations specializing in the depositing and lending of money and the creation of generally spendable IOUs that could serve in place of coins or other commodity moneys.
In June an anticorruption commission was set up to recover embezzled moneys, but no senior officials were prosecuted.
KfW Bankengruppe, the German development bank, donated a quarter of a billion dollars, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, USAID, and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) also contributed significant moneys.
Since 1970 there has been a marked increase in the number of private-sector museums, yet even some of these have corporate standing under general legislation and receive public moneys.
The earliest genuine European banks, in contrast, dealt neither in goods nor in bills of exchange but in gold and silver coins and bullion, and they emerged in response to the risks involved in storing and transporting precious metal moneys and, often, in response to the deplorable quality of available coins, which created a demand for more reliable and uniform substitutes.
This can result in a lack of flexibility in the use of such moneys, because the funds usually are subject to government policies that have little bearing on the particular requirements of museums.
With increasing restrictions on expenditure of public moneys, however, funding from multiple sources has become far more commonplace.
The losses would have been still more disastrous were it not for assistance provided by the American Relief Administration, headed by the future U.S. president Herbert Hoover, which, with moneys from the U.S. Congress and voluntary contributions, fed most of the starving.
