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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...

MF Global’s former chief executive, Jon S. Corzine, was gingerly questioned by the House Agriculture Committee for almost three hours on Thursday, in the end saying little enlightening about the firm’s collapse or the customer money that has gone missing. It seems unlikely that anything at the hearing can be used against him by criminal and civil investigators, so in that sense the testimony was a victory for Mr. Corzine. Rather than invoke the Fifth Amendment to protect himself, Mr. Corzine couched his answers with enough caveats and denials of specific knowledge that it would be nearly impossible to claim...

“I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date.” Let’s translate that Jon Corzine quote into Latin, engrave it in stone, and make it the official motto of Congress. Anybody remember that this Wall Street Democrat used to sit on the Senate committees on banking and the budget? Question: Why should we believe that the motives of people in (cough, cough) “public service” are different from the motives of people in the for-profit sector? Was Jon Corzine a rapacious self-seeker at Goldman Sachs, then a public-spirited man when he was...

Why The UK Trail Of The MF Global Collapse May Have "Apocalyptic" Consequences For The Eurozone, Canadian Banks, Jefferies And Everyone Else In an oddly prescient turn of events, yesterday we penned a post titled "Has The Imploding European Shadow Banking System Forced The Bundesbank To Prepare For Plan B?" in which we explained how it was not only the repo market, but the far broader and massively unregulated shadow banking system in Europe that was becoming thoroughly unhinged, and was manifesting itself in a complete "lock up in interbank liquidity" and which, we speculated, is pressuring the Bundesbank, which...

The shocking collapse of MF Global with the amount of missing client funds now rising to $1.2 billion, is so devastating, we are at the precipice of complete financial disaster. The United States boasts far too much of its greatness and “liberty and justice for all” but its actions reveal nothing but greed, distain, and contempt of the rights of man that include his right to property. Jon Corzine was a bond trader at Goldman Sachs and has been known as an aggressive trader all along. He intervened at the SEC and changed the direction of MF Global. What is...

Political ties win Corzine respect in CongressBy Alexandra Alper | Reuters – 15 hrs ago WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A day after Jon Corzine got politely grilled by lawmakers over the collapse of futures brokerage MF Global Holdings Ltd, questions remain over the role his deep political ties and generous donations will play as he gears up for another round of congressional scrutiny. Corzine, who resigned as chief of MF Global days after the firm filed for bankruptcy on October 31, has been a prominent fundraiser and personal contributor to Democrats. He personally donated $69,300 to Democratic causes this year alone,...

Jon Corzine, the former CEO of the bankrupt brokerage firm MF Global, has testified before Congress about his role in the company losing nearly a billion dollars. His responses were tentative, claiming ignorance of events. This prompted committee member, Rep. David Scott, D-Ga., to remark that it was the "height of disbelief" for Corzine ....

About $2 billion worth of European bonds owned by MF Global were bought by billionaire investor George Soros's family fund, the Wall Street Journal wrote on Friday, quoting people close to the matter. On October 31 MF Global collapsed into the eighth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history and an estimated $1.2 billion in client funds remains unaccounted for. SNIP hey were turned over to KPMG, MF Global's bankruptcy administrator in London; they were then offered to big investors immediately after the company's collapse by MF Global's London clearing house, LCH Clearnet, the paper said, quoting a KPMG spokeswoman. A number of...

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’...

(Business Law Currents) 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 MFÂ’s dying hours, but were instead appropriated as part of a mass Wall St manipulation of brokerage rules...

As the first former U.S. senator to be subpoenaed by Congress in more than a century, Jon Corzine testified Thursday about the “last chaotic days” of MF Global, the trading firm that declared bankruptcy under his watch. Corzine said he was “stunned” to learn that the firm could not locate hundreds of millions of dollars in client money in the days before the firm’s collapse, and said he had no idea where the money had gone.

I am watching Corzine, since it has the potential to take down the entire system. Which is worse, the corruption of our entire financial system, or the corruption of our justice system. Or is everything just about "gone down the drain", and the USA, as we once knew it, over.

Jon Corzine's professed ignorance of what's become of his former customers' money doesn't fly with John Roe, a leading member of the 7,000-account strong Commodity Customers Coalition, an ad-hoc group pushing for MF client funds to be released. "Ignorance is not a defense and it implies that his subordinates are at fault," says Roe, who is watching Thursday's hearing from an overflow room on Capitol Hill. "How did he run a state?"

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...

Former US Senator and New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine will testify before a House panel today to explain how MF Global, the firm he led for over a year and a half, collapsed and now can't account for $1.2 billion in client funds. Taking a page from the playbook of his political ally President Barack Obama, Mr. Corzine is expected to blame his predecessors and others rather than admit to his own failures.