Why Jon Corzine isn't in prison stripes and cuffs for his Congressional hearing next week is hard to fathom. Frank Lucas should have some sense and do the right thing, let Jeff Liddle and his firm into the fray and clean up right from wrong. Nope, look who gives to Frank's coffers. These psychopaths think they won't be prosecuted for anything. NO ONE has been indicted in the last few years for this insane mess.
Corzine stole hundreds of millions, maybe billions of unmargined customer cash, the CME didn't allow those customers to trade their options for a full week, costing actual ranchers and farmers hedging their business expectations like they must, hundreds of millions, and now they're talking about clawbacks of cash from recent customers who may even be totally out of the exchange altogether when the company went under! You steal a $6 item from WalMart today and go straight to jail.
Then you have creditors like BoA who think they should have first dibs at the bankruptcy. It's insane. If everyone is not made whole, EVERYONE, then the sacred law preventing the co-mingling of customer cash is destroyed, as is the trust in all brokers. If Corzine gets off on this, that means they can all get off, they can all say, for example, some broker like Schwab or Fidelity or Ameritrade or Interactive Brokers or Morgan Stanley can say "oh sure you have x number of shares in some company, see it says there right on our web page, and all sorts of cash there too, see it on the screen there?" Meanwhile, they could be doing exactly as MF Global's prop desk was doing, using that cash for their own purposes.
There is no gray area here, Corzine should go to straight to jail and the customers must be made whole, with the creditors taking ALL OF THE LOSSES. The whole system is destroyed because of the way this was handled. There is a clear path to make things right, and if they stray from it at all, then the whole thing is a goner.
Here's some of the latest that should make any investor shudder: Click here: MF Customer: $50M Commodity Account Gone - Bloomberg
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