The exact scale of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme may never be known, but it probably runs to tens of billions of dollars. Mr Madoff snookered thousands of the wealthiest people in America, dozens of charities and several universities. It was not news only in Manhattan when he pleaded guilty to 11 felonies on Thursday. It made headlines on other continents. Television channels sent helicopters. The Madoff case has become a powerful symbol. The odd thing is, no one is exactly sure what it is a symbol of.

You would guess our fascination has something to do with the present financial catastrophe. Does it, though? Mr Madoff was just a crook. He was not a central banker, a subprime borrower, an overzealous wielder of the Black-Scholes option-pricing formula, an originate-and- distribute mortgage operator or a lobbyist undermining the regulatory apparatus. Nor did he have any political significance. Had he been a partisan Republican or a big Republican donor, as many of the figures in the Enron scandal were, it is likely we would now be subjected to extravagant ad hominem metaphysical conceits about “Bush’s America”. But in fact he was a lifelong Democrat who found politics boring.