Flashing news about financial stability and central banking
Todays hearing in the Senate Banking committee on the MF Global bankruptcy were supposed to deal with how we can avoid a similar debacle in the future. Much of the action was still on where the money went and how this could happen. Not so much new information during a short two hour session, but obvious that the relevant rules (1.25 &30) could be used in a quite flexible way as a result of previous strong lobbying by Goldman Sachs (for rule making proposal to straighten up this loophole, see here, and for the objections from MF global, see here). Unbelievable that CFTC let them continue with investing client money in European debt and in-house repos! Gensler, chairman of CFTC and former colleague of Corzine at GS obviously has a problem with this case (he has left it to his commissioner Sommers to handle the case on the Hil)
This post from January capture the angry (and probably correct) mood among the MF Global clients, when it comes to lack of fair treatment. And nobody should believe that the money just “vaporized”. They were stolen twice!
