Missing $700 Million? Why Worry!
"Federal regulators have discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars in customer money has gone missing from MF Global in recent days, prompting an investigation into the brokerage firm….The recognition that money was missing scuttled at the 11th hour an agreement to sell a major part of MF Global to a rival brokerage firm. MF Global had staked its survival on completing the deal. Instead, the New York-based firm filed for bankruptcy on Monday…. The discovery that money could not be located might simply reflect sloppy internal controls at MF Global. It is still unclear where the money went. At first, as much as $950 million was believed to be missing, but as the firm sorted through its bankruptcy, that figure fell to less than $700 million by late Monday."
—Yesterday's revelations about MF Global, the company with Jon Corzine as CEO, have gotten even more hysterically revelatory.
Those sneaky MFers
@Dave Bry Yes, in fairness, they did put it in the name.
@dntsqzthchrmn Question for someone's Google Alert: Did any news outlet go with any variation on "MF Doom" for a headline? And if so, did the subhead reference any sort of "Madvillainy"?
@Dave Bry Who took these MF'ing dollars from my MF'ing brokerage firm?
@Dave Bry Time for an overview of MF Doom videos?
@NFK I thought they were going to tell me that Samuel L. Jackson was the CEO.
Leverage is a wonderful thing. Millions can disappear over night – into thin air or pockets.
The papers here in Chicago say MF Global ran into problems because they focused on the unstable European economic market. I.e., blame this on the foreigners.
IS MF Global one of those fancy-pants financial services firms that won't even return your calls unless you have six figures to invest, or are people's 401Ks and such getting wiped out by this. Because that would determine a lot about how I react to this story, because, you know, class war.
(Seriously, what does happen if your 401K is invested in supposedly safe-ish mutual funds, and the bank/brokerage/financial services entity/whatever whose name is on those funds goes bankrupt?)
@jfruh Those funds are pools of assets that you and the other investors own that are held and traded by them. The bank can go bankrupt because it has lost all of its own money/can't make the margin calls/is denied credit for other reasons. Your assets would still be yours, and they would be safe. (That is, they would make or lose money based entirely on the performance of the underlying assets, stocks, bonds, real estate whatever.)
HOWEVER: the worry at MF Global is that they pulled money from your account to cover their house losses, and at this point, they are criminals with insufficient assets to cover your account and you have to get in line with everyone else they owe.