Monday, October 31, 2011
Should Jon Corzine go to jail?
Zero Hedge argues more than a little persuasively that the question needs to be asked and, quite possibly, answered in the affirmative.
Yet another prominent Democratic Wall Streeter hopes that the Obama administration will divert its prosecutorial resources elsewhere.
14 Comments:
By 
, at
Tue Nov 01, 12:09:00 AM:
Purely for score keeping purposes, who will turn out to have stolen more: Madoff or Corzine?
By 
Mr. Bingley, at
Tue Nov 01, 07:38:00 AM:
Commingling is really really bad.
He'll make a great Treasury Secretary.
By , at
Tue Nov 01, 09:43:00 AM:
Of course not, he's a democrat.
By Georg Felis, at
Tue Nov 01, 08:29:00 PM:
Even though he's a democrat, he committed the ultimate sin (other than being rich). He stole from other democrats. For that crime alone, he will be hounded to the ends of the earth.
Now if he had stolen from Republicans, then he would be held up as an example...
By , at
Wed Nov 02, 11:53:00 AM:
Jon Corzine in stripes would be very attractive.
By , at
Wed Nov 02, 01:48:00 PM:
Is there any difference between what Corzine oversaw here and what Obama is doing? Obama thumbed his nose at the rule of law and auto bondholders to bailout his auto union buddies.
Obama has promised transparency but hires tax cheats and still takes money from lobbyists (except by "definition of is" hair-splitting).
Corzine bought Eurozone bonds and went tits up. Obama zoomed National debt by 40% and has modelled our future on that same bankrupt euro spend/entitle model and focused on dividing the Pie rather than growing it. Now Obama has encouraged Occupy's community activists to take to the streets and replicate his own Shakedown of BP.
Corzine is Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, Crony capitalism and this is who really pulls Obama's strings
By Viking Kaj, at
Thu Nov 03, 12:43:00 PM:
Don't expect the Daley White House to prosecute, Corzine has already raised a half a mil for 2012.
Now if Christie becomes AG things could get interesting...
By Viking Kaj, at
Thu Nov 03, 12:45:00 PM:
Hey. Why doesn't somebody scoot uptown to "occupy" Corzine's 5th Avenue apartment???
By Jim - PRS, at
Thu Nov 03, 09:40:00 PM:
Carla Katz could not be reached for comment.
By , at
Fri Nov 04, 02:12:00 AM:
Should Jon Corzine go to jail?
Yes.
Next question?
By , at
Fri Nov 04, 09:15:00 AM:
Corzine was way out of his league in the MF job, obviously. Corzine resigns, hires a lawyer.
By , at
Fri Nov 04, 10:06:00 AM:
I'm echoing Anonymous, at Wed Nov 02, 01:48:00 PM
Corzine is Obama's biggest Wall Street bundler, and had aspirations of being Treasury Secretary. Maybe he still has such aspirations. He's that deluded, and in our new Crony Borg system of running things, why not?
Charlie Gasparino had a recent critical piece to say that Corzine was actually a poor Wall Street player. He was a jumped up bond guy who didn't know how to manage risk -- just how to take it. (Blankfein knows how to manage risk -- he lays it off pretty well, doesn't he?). When it caught up to Corzine when the bond group blew up with losses, he got pushed out of Goldman. He couldn't find a job in business big enough for his ego, so he bought his way into politics.
Now I go paranoid: Corzine got the job at MF Global because private equity investor Chris Flowers was an investor. Flowers was Corzine's asshole buddy at Goldman before they both left around and about its IPO. Flowers might have stayed to become CEO, but Corzine's bond losses nixed that, so Paulson took over. Flowers used his Goldman IPO winnings to start his own PE firm which invests in financial companies, especially in distressed. Flowers takes big risky bets. He's trying to get assymetric returns inherent in the optionality of the PE model: "I get more of the upside than I do the downside because of my ability to strategically default." His first fund killed, his second is down 50%, his third is playing in Europe.
Corzine blew up MF Global by making a huge levered bet on European sovereigns. But MF Global wasn't supposed to be the kind of company that took big positions -- it was supposed to be a New Wave Middleman. WTF?
So in one scenario, Corzine just reverted to his old self except at a firm that wasn't Too Big to Fail. The theft of a few hundred million of client funds to buy a week's time was regrettable but excusable. Corzine wouldn't have had to resort to it if he was still at Goldman. Tim and Ben would have covered it.
In another scenario, Corzine, Flowers and others are playing a much bigger game. Capice?! Were I Flowers, I'd love to control an entity that can make outsized, market-moving trades, when I have other positions in the market. This is where the beauty of CDSs as a speculative vehicle really shine. "Speculative" isn't really the right word to describe this, is it?
That I can think of this latter scenario as being plausible and not just paranoid says a lot about the state of the World. We have a global financial system that's run off the rails. It's a slow-developing but enormous train wreck. We have a total lack of transparency. A dozen or so folks on speed dial to one another are making momentous decisions without oversight. They're tied to others who are in a position to profit from having prior knowledge.
... and it ties into the White House. I used to sign off comments like this with "Bienvenidos a Argentina" but we're well past your basic Peronism.
Am I wrong?
By , at
Fri Nov 04, 11:04:00 PM:
By , at
Tue Nov 08, 07:56:00 AM:
Saw this elsewhere. Thought for the day:
Jon Corzine will have you know that each time a door closes, a bigger, more fucking awesome one opens.
