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President Obama is trying to put some distance between himself and the wreckage of bankrupt brokerage MF Global. But not too much distance. After returning more than $70,000 to Jon Corzine, the CEO who led MF Global into bankruptcy, the president’s re-election organizations are still hanging onto nearly $150,000 connected to the firm, The Post has learned. An Obama campaign official said no MF Global donations besides Corzine’s have been refunded. “Contributions will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis, and if the facts merit it, they will be returned,” the official told The Post. Late Friday, aides revealed that Obama...

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama's re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee have returned more than $70,000 in contributions from former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine following the collapse of MF Global, Corzine's financial firm, officials said Friday. Obama's campaign and the DNC returned contributions of $35,800 from Corzine and his wife, Sharon Elghanayan, said Democratic officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. They were not authorized to speak publicly. Corzine was among Obama's top fundraisers, raising at least $500,000 for Obama's re-election campaign since April, according to records released by the campaign. The former Goldman Sachs chief held...

President Barack Obama and the DNC plan to return $71,600 donated by disgraced former MF Global head Jon Corzine and his wife, a source confirmed to POLITICO. The money was split between the DNC Victory Fund and the reelection effort. But Corzine was not just a donor but also a bundler, including from other MF Global employees. The source said the other donations from employees will be looked at case by case and, if the facts warrant it, returned. The news came late on the Friday before Christmas, generall

I have received a few emails asking if I was still content with my decision to shut down my brokerage. Not only am I content, but after seeing the news that broke over the weekend, I am of the considered opinion that the entire financial blogging community should formally call for a general financial market strike. And I’m not kidding. A couple of things have happened regarding the MF Global mess that I don’t think got the attention they should have because they broke over the weekend. So let me fill you all in. First, all notions of personal property...

I have received a few emails asking if I was still content with my decision to shut down my brokerage. Not only am I content, but after seeing the news that broke over the weekend, I am of the considered opinion that the entire financial blogging community should formally call for a general financial market strike. And I’m not kidding. A couple of things have happened regarding the MF Global mess that I don’t think got the attention they should have because they broke over the weekend. So let me fill you all in. First, all notions of personal property...

Investors are furious that they can't get back the gold and silver they stashed with the failed brokerage. It's one thing for $1.2 billion to vanish into thin air through a series of complex trades, the well-publicized phenomenon at bankrupt MF Global. It's something else for a bar of silver stashed in a vault to instantly shrink in size by more than 25%. That, in essence, is what's happening to investors whose bars of silver and gold were held through accounts with MF Global. The trustee overseeing the liquidation of the failed brokerage has proposed dumping all remaining customer assets—gold,...

Thank you. It is good to see you. Hello, New Jersey! (Applause.) All right, everybody have a seat. Everybody have a seat. I want to begin by just making a few acknowledgements. First of all, I'm going to have a lot to say about this guy, but I just want everybody to know that one of my earliest supporters, somebody who had faith and confidence in me before I was a United States senator was the man standing next to me right here -- Jon Corzine. (Applause.)

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....

I have been getting a lot of emails asking what to do in the aftermath of MF Global. Quite frankly, it is a very difficult question to answer. This game of trading with other people’s money has got to stop. The NY Press will not expose the truth because their biggest client advertisers are the very firms doing this nonsense. Hedge Funds have suffered losses. Readers as far away as Singapore have their funds frozen when all they had were TBills on deposit. Farmers lost hedge positions. Anyone who wants to really compare the damage, it is 1000 times greater...

The Democratic senator who savaged Jon Corzine at a high-profile Capitol Hill hearing this week had another reason to go hard on her former colleague — she recently pressed him for campaign contributions but didn’t get any. “She would literally call once every two or three weeks,” one Corzine intimate said of Sen. Debbie Stabenow (DMich.). “She called all the time.” Stabenow, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, had blasted the former senator and New Jersey governor Tuesday for his failure to explain what happened to $1.2 billion in missing customer money from his bankrupt firm, MF Global. “This isn’t...

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...

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...

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.

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...

The regulatory arm of CME Group has turned over interviews to the Justice Department that allege former MF Global chief Jon Corzine knew that the now-bankrupt brokerage firm used customer money to lend to a European affiliate, a CME executive said on Tuesday. The information is fourth-hand but is the strongest statement yet from a regulator that Corzine may have personally known customer funds were diverted for firm use. Federal investigators are probing why hundreds of millions of dollars in customer funds are missing, and whether the futures brokerage raided customer money to try to counter a liquidity crisis, a...

Today, in advance of their sworn testimony, each witness to the Senate Agricultural Committee's MF Global hearing was requested to disclose what their prepared remarks would be. Sure enough, CME executive chairman Terry Duffy did that, and his prepared testimony can be found here. In and of itself there was nothing unexpected about said speech, the relevant section of which has been transcribed below. Where things got very ugly for Corzine, is when Duffy literally veered from the script, and added three unexpected sentences, catching everyone in the committee off guard (including those who had given up on the testimony...

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...

The Collapse Of MF Global Basically Started On Corzine's Day 1 Ben Walsh Dec. 12, 2011, 8:36 AM Image: AP MF Global Client's Counsel Blasts Jon Corzine Calling His Prepared Testimony 'Cowardly' And A 'Cop-Out' Five Reasons Why Wall Street Enjoyed Today's Corzine HearingMF Global's Bankruptcy Trustee Finally Pinpointed The Shady Trades In Customer Accounts When Jon Corzine, on a visit to MF Global's Chicago office shortly after becoming CEO in 2010, Dealbook reported that he discovered that a young trader was successfully using a small account to trade the firm's capital, he was enthralled. With widening eyes, Corzine suspended...