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The trustee overseeing MF Global's liquidation has come out and confirmed that the amount of customers’ funds of the failed brokerage are now expected to be at least $1.6 billion. This gap has now risen from the previous estimate of $1.2 billion. This is the biggest financial crime perhaps in history far worse than Madoff. This is the outright theft of client funds that nobody is being called to account for no less the recipients of such funds being made to return them. The collapse of MF Global, which was headed by former Goldman Sachs CEO, Senator, and New Jersey...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLt05sN7vK0&feature=player_embedded

Investigators have determined what happened to nearly all of the customer money that disappeared from MF Global around the time of its bankruptcy last Oct. 31, but have not publicly disclosed their progress, fearing that doing so might cripple efforts to recover the cash and pursue potential wrongdoing, people briefed on the investigation said.

When last heard from, former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine was telling a congressional committee he hadn’t the foggiest idea what happened to $1.2 billion of his Wall Street clients’ money. This, following the $6.3 billion collapse last fall of MF Global, the brokerage Corzine took over after voters ousted him from the Trenton statehouse. The firm went belly-up after Corzine decided to risk pretty much everything on European debt. But an audit couldn’t account for $1.2 billion, and suggested the firm may have illegally mixed client funds with the company’s own. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that...

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...

Like I said the boo-hoo'ing white American animals are now complaining about banks taking their fake and fiat money from their MF Global accounts? Well, isn't this rich? First these whites go on talk radio to rant and rave about bankers and fiat currency, even as they purchase homes, boats and cars with fake fiat credit cards, which whites got preferential treatment for 30 years and while ranting about not having money backed by gold, these same whites and ethnic central/eastern Euro, last century, migrating trailer trash animals, were dealing in fiat fake gold money accounts aka "futures" that have...

Instead of looking out for MF Global investors – and customers who are still waiting for their money – it looks like regulators and the bankruptcy trustees are busy suppressing information. Instead of full transparency, regulators and the trustees are holding onto crucial details that might tell us all who was asleep at the wheel when the broker/dealer and futures commission merchant (FCM) headed over the cliff. Bob English, an independent trader and contributing editor to the blog, Economic Policy Journal, published a post this morning that raises serious questions about the Securities and Exchange Commission’s program of regulation for broker/dealers...

Montana farmers have filed a class action suit against former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, charging that the failed financial firm run by Corzine stole millions from their accounts to pay off its spiraling debts, and that Corzine's "single-minded obsession" with making MF Global a big player on Wall Street led to the firm's collapse. MF Global's clients included 38,000 wheat farmers, cattle ranchers and others who "hedged" their crop prices by placing millions in MF Global accounts. Those accounts were supposed to be "segregated and secure," according to the federal suit, meaning MF Global could not draw on those...

In recent testimony before a Congressional committee, MF Global’s former chief Jon Corzine as well as other MF Global executives said repeatedly the didn’t know where the failed brokerage firm’s $1.2 billion of missing client money was. In fact, MF Global executives knew exactly what happened to the money, as do the regulators who oversaw the firm’s bankruptcy. The so-called segregated customer funds were repeatedly, and legally (through re-hypothication), used as collateral for MF Global loans for 100:1 leveraged bets on European sovereign debt. Rehypothication is the 800lb gorilla (Editor’s note: make that the 2,000 lb gorilla). In 2007 I...

While nearly three months after the MF Global bankruptcy nobody still has any idea where the billion + in commingled client money has gone, nor why Corzine is still out and about walking freely, the former CEO of both Goldman, MF Global and New Jersey is rumored to be looking for office space at 40 Wall. Reports the WSJ:

It’s been a long while now since that frightful Halloween when MF Global filed the eighth-largest bankruptcy in the history of the United States. Too long a time if you are an MF customer and can’t get access or answers to what happen to your money. Certain individuals at MF Global breached the sacrosanctity of segregated customer accounts to cover for liquidity shortfalls induced from extremely leveraged bets gone extremely bad, reportedly made by CEO Jon Corzine and his confidants. Which brings us to a primary point in the MF Global debacle: Exactly where were Jon Corzine’s millions held while...

Even though we haven't quite found MF Global's $1.2 billion that went missing, Vanity Fair did find out he and his wife Sharon were talking about a château they were about to buy in the South of France. The preview of the February issue's Corzine exposé is up online--complete with cocktail party anecdotes from their 1 percent-sounding acquaintances. If you ask us, this haughty "Not Cap Ferrat" insult is the best (and worst) part: “It’s not in Cap Ferrat,” one person recalls Elghanayan saying, perhaps to mitigate the extravagance. “To buy any decent château is at least a couple of...

The same man who oversaw MF Global’s $1.2 billion in missing funds, Bradley I. Abelow, is also currently listed on the Environmental Protection Agency’s website as the current chairman of the EPA’s Financial Advisory Board. SNIP Mr. Abelow also served as former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine’s chief of staff before Mr. Corzine went on to become MF Global’s CEO. Interestingly, current EPA Administrator Lisa Smith also previously served as then-Gov. Corzine’s chief of staff. Whether the Corzine connection played any role in Mr. Abelow’s appointment to the chairmanship of the EPA’s Financial Advisory Board is as yet unclear. Mr....

No wonder the stimulus didn't work. Download the RNC briefing book: "My Wall Street Guy: Barack Obama & Jon Corzine"

In an exclusive Human Events interview, the senior Republican on the Senate’s Agriculture Committee's Jobs, Rural Economic Growth and Energy Innovation subcommittee discusses his take on the MF Global bankruptcy scandal. “I have heard from several South Dakotans who were affected by the apparent fraud that occurred in the final days of MF Global before its collapse,” said Sen. John R. Thune (R-S.D.), who worked in the Small Business Administration​ under President Ronald W. Reagan. [Video of Thune's December 13 questioning Corzine is at the bottom of the article.] The firm’s Halloween bankruptcy was followed by the November 4 resignation...

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...

http://www.economicnoise.com/

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...