The last days of MF Global

Fortune ^ | 4 Jun 2012 | Peter Elkind

[Hoodat]

FORTUNE -- At about 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 25, David Schamis, a director of a once-obscure futures brokerage company called MF Global, placed a call to his friend, Jacob Goldfield.

Goldfield, 52, was a former trading superstar who had spent 15 years at Goldman Sachs—brilliant and impeccably connected (Bob Rubin and Larry Summers loved him), but equally quirky and unassuming. Raised in the South Bronx, he'd majored in physics at Harvard before dropping out of law school there to start at Goldman, where he made partner in record time.

After leaving the partnership with a fortune in 2000, Goldfield helped manage U.S. Senator Jon Corzine's blind trust and spent a year and a half as chief investment officer for George Soros' $11-billion hedge fund. Now on his own, he periodically journeyed west to Stanford, where he conducted research at a business-school think tank.

Goldfield was a crisis junkie. He exuded a childlike fascination with economic events, especially disasters. He found himself summoned to the scene of each new meltdown—AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers—by desperate men seeking his aid in the often-hopeless struggle to save a balance sheet under siege. Sometimes he stood to make some money, if a private rescue actually went through. Sometimes it was just volunteer work. Goldfield did it for his friends, or simply because he found it interesting.

Goldfield held a singular notion of how to think about a financial crisis. He viewed it as a predator, intelligent and merciless, hunting you. If you didn't move fast enough, you'd meet a swift and certain end.

Now MF Global needed his advice.

[Hoodat]

I still don't know why John Corzine isn't sitting in a jail cell right now awaiting trial for embezzlement and misappropriation of funds.

[Revolting cat!]

Your answer! (But you already know it!)

[struggle]

Mitt needs to make the point that Obama has NEVER put a banker in jail. In fact, his whole DOJ are bank lawyers. Keep on hitting Obama with the crony capitalism.

[Zakeet]

[Lazlo in PA]

Its businesses operated like independent states, with different compensation systems, more than a dozen brand names, and 262 websites

Sounds to me like a classic scam, so multilayered that no one has any idea what is going on. Plausible deniability for all the principles.

[Son House]

Banks Pressured to Buy Government Debt
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2890296/posts

US and European regulators are essentially forcing banks to buy up their own government's debt—a move that could end up making the debt crisis even worse, a Citigroup analysis says.

Regulators are allowing banks to escape counting their country's debt against capital requirements and loosening other rules to create a steady market for government bonds, the study says.

[L,TOWM]

Ohh, please. You certainly know by now that jail is for the little people, my good man. We certainly can’t have the plebes thinking that have equal standing under the law with their betters, can we?

Remember, if an idiot gets $80 out of the till at the 7-11, het gets 20 years. If you steal a few hundred million and change the lives of thousands for the worse, you walk. That’s 21st Century American “justice”.

[Carry_Okie]

MF Global had promoted itself to IPO investors as a growth story, citing soaring revenues and profits. But those numbers masked a gaping weakness in its business model. Because of shrinking commissions—and unusually generous payment arrangements with its brokers—MF Global's core trading business was actually a money-loser; its chief purpose was to attract billions in customer deposits.

Weakness? Since when did overpaying shills to defraud customers as a "business model" constitute anything other than fraud? This was a classic boiler room operation and nothing more.

It is euphemisms like this that excuse this kind of behavior. Thank you Forbes.

[StAnDeliver]

"At about 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 25, David Schamis, a director of a once-obscure futures brokerage company called MF Global, placed a call to his friend, Jacob Goldfield"

Subpoena!