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MF Global judge weighs release of insurance moneyBy Nick Brown and Aruna Viswanatha | Reuters – Mon, Apr 2, 2012 (Reuters) - An MF Global bankruptcy trustee asked a judge on Monday to release $25 million in insurance money to pay defense costs for Jon Corzine and other former MF Global officers facing civil lawsuits over the broker's October collapse. If paid out now, the money, part of $375 million in total insurance funds from multiple policies, could save the broker from facing larger claims later, Lorenzo Marinuzzi, an attorney for trustee Louis Freeh, said in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in...

<p>Jon S. Corzine gave "direct instructions" to move $200 million from an MF Global Holdings Ltd. account containing customer funds three days before the securities firm collapsed, according to an employee email reviewed by congressional investigators.</p> <p>The Oct. 28 email was disclosed in a five-page memo released Friday afternoon by a House Financial Services subcommittee. The panel is investigating what caused an estimated $1.6 billion shortfall in customer funds at MF Global, which collapsed into bankruptcy Oct. 31.</p>

Nearly three months after MF Global Holdings Ltd. collapsed, officials hunting for an estimated $1.2 billion in missing customer money increasingly believe that much of it might never be recovered, according to people familiar with the investigation. As the sprawling probe that includes regulators, criminal and congressional investigators, and court-appointed trustees grinds on, the findings so far suggest that a “significant amount” of the money could have “vaporized” as a result of chaotic trading at MF Global during the week before the company’s Oct. 31 bankruptcy filing, said a person close to the investigation. Many officials now believe certain employees...

Liquidation Of Customer Stored Gold And Silver Bullion From MF Global Commodities / Gold and Silver 2011 Dec 17, 2011 - 12:27 PM By: Jesse The bottom line is that apparently some warehouses and bullion dealers are not a safe place to store your gold and silver, even if you hold a specific warehouse receipt. In an oligarchy, private ownership is merely a concept, subject to interpretation and confiscation. Although the details and the individual perpetrators are yet to be disclosed, what is now painfully clear is that the CFTC and CME regulated futures system is defaulting on its obligations....

Yesterday we learned, to our great joy, that we no longer have to worry about the twin evils of global warming and hurricanes combining to stop Obama’s stimulus plan. For those of you who missed yesterday’s column, we showed that the not-greedy scientists, who very unlike the Republican bankers who took down the whole housing sector just because they are greedy… well, the scientists anyway demonstrated that hurricanes and global warming are not in any way scientifically or romantically linked. In a work published in late November on the site for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the chief scientist...

It was a humiliating moment, but Jon Corzine was determined to put the best face on it. On Oct. 25 of last year -- six days before the stunning collapse of MF Global Holdings Ltd., the New York-based brokerage and commodities firm he headed -- Corzine released the company's dismal results for the second fiscal quarter of 2012. Revenue, he was forced to report, had declined from the same period the year before, from over $240 million to about $205 million; and selected losses for shareholders were estimated at $191.6 million, an increase of almost $100 million from the prior...

ver read junk novels that are designed for the beach? Every summer, they churn out hundreds of paperback novels that people, most often women, read by the pool or ocean. The plot in these things is the same year after year, only the characters and descriptions of them change. Investment banking scandals are the same. No one involved with MF Global slept last night. Big time bankers are networked to the hilt. They derive a lot of their income from having a great personal network of contacts. Great investment bankers are super connectors. Apply that logic to what is happening...

Regulators now have a more complete picture of money transfers in the final days of bankrupt brokerage MF Global, but must sort out which transactions were legitimate before more money can be released to customers, a top official told Reuters on Wednesday. Jill Sommers, who is heading the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's review of MF Global, said regulators "are far enough along the trail" that they know where the money went. "Now it's just finding out which ones of those transactions are legitimate and which ones of them are illegitimate," Sommers said.

In a softball interview with Sen. Debbie Stabenow on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough on Tuesday asked the Michigan Democrat if it was difficult for her to grill a friend and colleague, the former New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine, on the MF Global scandal. At one point, Scarborough enthused, "Senator Corzine. I like him a lot. We like him." Co-host Mika Brzezinski started out the interview by asking Stabenow on how they would be taking on the MF Global investigation. The Michigan senator essentially rattled off the hearing's witness list. Scarborough then interrupted, not to press Stabenow about what...

I think what MF Global and John Corzine did is called “cooking the books”.   Here is a link to the hearing.  Some may jump to Corzine’s defense.  If they cooked the books, then he lied at his Congressional Hearing, which is perjury. The question I have is this.  If someone had the lack of ethics to capriciously steal customer funds and fill a hole in their firm’s books-what makes you think they wouldn’t lie at a Congressional hearing to protect their own butt?The funny thing is that the $CME is giving an exact timeline of their data.  They can...

An executive of a financial exchange monitoring MF Global told senators Tuesday that Jon Corzine, the former head of the financial firm, knew that loans were improperly made with customer funds. The claim was made just minutes after Corzine professed his ignorance for how up to $1.2 billion in customer funds had gone missing. Terrence Duffy, the executive chairman of CME Group, the exchange that regulates MF Global, told the Senate Agriculture Committee that a CME auditor was told by an MF Global executive that Corzine knew that a loan was made to a European affiliate of the company, and...

I don’t know. Maybe he should have stuck with the Fifth Amendment:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Jon S. Corzine, the former U.S. senator and governor who presided over the collapse of the commodities brokerage MF Global, told lawmakers Thursday that he never intended to authorize a transfer of customer funds to the firm’s accounts and that if he did “it was a misunderstanding.”Under pointed questioning by members of the House Committee on Agriculture, the New Jersey Democrat would not rule out the possibility that someone at the firm misinterpreted him as suggesting that the struggling firm tap into investors’...

Simply said: when one truly digs in, MF Global exposes the 2011 equivalent of the 2008 AIG: virtually unlimited leverage via the shadow banking system, in which there are practically no hard assets backing the infinite layers of debt created above, and which when finally unwound, will create a cataclysmic collapse of all financial institutions, where every bank is daisy-chained to each other courtesy of multiple layers of "hypothecation, and re-hypothecation."

A legal loophole in international brokerage regulations means that few, if any, clients of MF Global are likely to get their money back. Although details of the drama are still unfolding, it appears that MF Global and some of its Wall Street counterparts have been actively and aggressively circumventing U.S. securities rules at the expense (quite literally) of their clients. MF Global's bankruptcy revelations concerning missing client money suggest that funds were not inadvertently misplaced or gobbled up in MF’s dying hours, but were instead appropriated as part of a mass Wall St manipulation of brokerage rules that allowed for...

Probably far more anticipated than the monetary announcements out of BOE (which just announced it is keeping rates at a record low of 0.5%, but no more QE), or even the ECB, and certainly far more than the latest and not greatest European summit which begins today, is the 9am testimony out of the House Agriculture Committee by one "Honorable" Jon S. Corzine, as well as the Q&A that will follow. Naturally the Q&A will be the focus, but as for the prepared remarks, they have just been released and are presented below. The choice selection: "Obviously on the forefront...

The millions that Jon Corzine amassed as head of Goldman Sachs have become an alluring target for investors who were crushed by the collapse of MF Global, the brokerage firm he led until earlier this month. And Corzine isn't the only one who may be financially vulnerable after the eighth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Others include MF Global's other top executives; its auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers; and some big Wall Street banks. Even MF Global itself, which can't be sued while in bankruptcy protection, could sue its former executives.

We’ve already established that no one will go to jail over $40 billion turfing of the brokerage firm MF Global, one of history’s largest bankruptcies. MF Global died by the hand of the former Jon Corzine, the former golden boy at Goldman Sachs, the former Senator, the former Governor, the former Obama guru with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago; the sage with the Sixties beard wrapped in a custom-made Burberry suit and tie.   Like a lot of stories these days, Chicago works its way in there like a burr buried deep in someone’s hair since the 1960s.   ...

Earlier this year MF Global issued Investment Grade bonds. In the underwriting process they added a clause to the bonds ... IF Jon Corzine is chosen to be the Secretary of the Treasury the bonds will have an additional 1% kick-in. I would say that was like saying, "Hey, there is a good chance that Jon Corzine is going to be Secretary of the Treasury and you will get another 1% on these bonds." Today bondholders would probably prefer that the clause say that ... "If Jon Corzine takes down the firm you will receive back your principal."This is a...

This was forwarded to me by a colleague…Great letter To: James W. Giddens, Trustee, SIPA Liquidation of MF Global, Inc. and Martin Glenn, United States Bankruptcy Judge From: Cathy Cuthbert RE: MF Global Heist I am a lucky, former MF Global client. Unfortunately, I’m not a multi-billionaire who got the memo. I had a modest account that was supplying me with a modest livelihood, when suddenly one Monday afternoon, my account was frozen, my livelihood was essentially gone and four years worth of trading profits vanished into cyber space. You might be interested to know that sitting on my desk...

The court-appointed trustee overseeing the liquidation of MF Global’s brokerage now estimates that the shortfall in the firm’s customer funds could be more than $1.2 billion, double previous estimates.