Another Weekend at Bernie’sScott Turow, in “The Minus Touch” [March], has confused criminal activity with free-market self-regulation. Most criminal activity is already illegal, and when the government tries to regulate the free market, something bad usually happens. People like Bernie Madoff think they are smarter or otherwise above the law, and they will continue to exploit gullible people who do not do their homework about their investments. Until penalties for perpetrating such scams are as draconian as they are in, say, China, these kinds of things will continue to happen.

Chuck Wegman
Richmond, Texas

Finally, someone as fascinated as I am with the art of the Madoff scam. Turow, unlike psychologists, ferrets out what a tool the human imagination can be.

Jane Genova
New Haven, Connecticut

Cash Recall?In “Showing the Money” [March], John Cassidy argues that we need not worry about the inflationary ramifications of the Federal Reserve’s flooding the economy with money, because banks are holding on to it in any case. But we should be concerned that this stockpiling prevents the Fed from having an impact on the money supply. That failure is more dispiriting than the specter of inflation. Secondly, Cassidy seems confident that the Fed can simply restrict the money supply once inflation takes hold. History shows that central banks are far less eager to mop money up when times are good than inject money when they’re bad.

Dan Seymour
New York, New York

Whose America?Matthew Cooper’s February column, ­“Labor Pains,” quotes an “apoplectic” Jack Welch excoriating the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize. Welch implies that the interests of corporate America are contrary to those of the American worker. Is the health of a company more important than the health of a nation?

I want to know just what the definition of patriotism is over on Wall Street.

Vikas Jeet Puri
Seattle, Washington

The ConversationInquiring minds want to know: What happened to the runaway CFO?

Early last year, John Glasgow, an executive at CDI, a construction firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, disappeared. In “The Runaway CFO” [March], Suzanna Andrews wrote of the search for him and the suspicions some have about what role Dillard’s—the department-store chain that co-owned CDI—may have played in the drama. Readers online were hooked instantly.

“He feared for his life,” one anonymous Hercule Poirot wrote. “I think he was probably blackmailed for cash, but why is there no body? Why would he leave the house so early?”

Thus far, Dillard’s has ­refused to release Glasgow’s work-related email to his family to aid in the investigation, fueling the cloak-and-dagger talk. “Clearly, such a move makes Dillard’s look like it has something to hide,” an anonymous Miss Marple deduced. “Who was he emailing on that Sunday he went into work? What was he working on? Who was he going to meet the morning he disappeared—assuming he was going to meet someone?”

On the other hand, an anonymous Sherlock Holmes could see why Glasgow would want to disappear: “When the former comptroller says the cost of constructing a store for Dillard’s was at cost plus 2 percent, I see the possibility of Glasgow facing a hole in the numbers wide enough to steer a ship through.”