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Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Someone Is Going To Jail For This: MF Global Caught Stealing Hundreds Of Millions From Customers?

Say you are the head back office guy at MF Global, it is the close of trading on Thursday, the firm has already completely drawn down [11]on its revolver, and all the resulting cash in addition to all the firm's cash at your disposal in affiliated bank accounts, up to and including petty cash, has been used to satisfy margin demands due to declining collateral value, yet the collateral calls just won't stop, and impatient voices on the other side of the phone line demand you transfer even more cash over immediately or else risk default proceedings commenced against you within minutes. What do you do? Do you go ahead and tell your superior that the firm is broke even though the co-opted media is trumpeting every 5 minutes that "MF Global is fine", knowing full well you will be immediately fired for being the bearer of bad news, or do you assume that courtesy of your uber-boss being the former head of the Vampire Squid, and thanks to infinite moral hazard which after Lehman made sure nobody would ever fail ever again, that there is simply no way that you will be left without some miraculous rescue, if only you can last one more day, and as a result proceed to "commingle" some client funds with the firm's cash. It turns out that at MF Global you do the latter... over and over... until you have literally stolen hundreds of millions from the firm's client accounts in hopes that the miracle rescue will come on Friday... then over the weekend... and then you realize no miracle is coming, partly because your actions have been exposed, partly because miracles only exist in fairy tales. The next thing you know, your firm is bankrupt and hundreds of clients are about to learn that all their money is gone. Poof. This is not a fictional tale. This is precisely what very likely happened at MF Global in the past 72 hours. And someone has to go to jail. That someone, if indeed this criminal act is proven to have taken place, should be none other than Jon Corzine himself.
The sad truth of just how low Wall Street has fallen comes to us courtesy of the New York Times [12]:
Federal regulators have discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars in customer money have gone missing from MF Global in recent days, prompting an investigation into the company’s operations as it filed for bankruptcy on Monday, according to several people briefed on the matter.

The revelation of the missing money scuttled an 11th hour deal for MF Global to sell a major part of itself to a rival brokerage firm. MF Global, the powerhouse commodities brokerage run by Jon S. Corzine, had staked its survival on completing the deal.
As for the details:

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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Got to love zerohedge. Jon corzine cancels his cnbc interview this morning. Guilty! Now greece is looking at a referendum that may blow up its austerity plan and debt relief payment. Risk on. Italy, spain, port....let the dominoes fall. Why do people wonder why occupy wall strret is protesting??

Anonymous said...

First he bankrupted New Jersey, then MF Global.
Stupid libtards can't run anything!

Anonymous said...

stupid libtards?

How about Federal Reserve insider and high level Freemason?

He isn't stupid. He is a criminal. There is still a difference you know?

Anonymous said...

We can credit George Dubya' Bush with confusing the public into a choice between his being "stupid" (preferred conclusion) versus his being "criminal" (dreaded conclusion).

The public is so "stupid" that it concludes erroneously that he was stupid instead of realizing he was / is a criminal.

Anonymous said...

I must still be stupid. I can't find any reference to Bush's involvement in this anywhere.

Anonymous said...

I hope it is that demarcat parasite Cozine