? I don't understand what obsoleting the floor had to do with this. Floor traders and screen traders were hit equally by this.
It reflects a sequence of events driven by greed - order matching computers work cheaper than people. I suppose this reflects progress and the globalization of trading. But in direct sequence we now have HFT and flash crashes. These serve no public good.
who is the counter party to MF Globals losses, meaning someone got a huge payoff of other peoples money. Who was on the other side of the european bond trade?
MF Dumped European Debt at Loss Before Bankruptcy http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204358004577028493994063210.html "As investors lost confidence in the company during the days leading up to the bankruptcy filing, Chief Executive Jon S. Corzine and MF Global worked frantically to sell the position and other assets on MF Global's books. The company sold the positions at a loss, according to a person familiar with the trades. The size of the losses couldn't be determined." from the wall street article, ever try to put on a futures trade and the system says not enough margin. How can they keep 50,000 accounts from over stepping on margin, but 1/2 a billion in cash and positions mysteriously vanishes, this is a tall tale that would make Paul Bunyan blush. Put another way if I stole 500 million and lost it at the casino its plausible that the casino owners may have to give back the money. The casino owners being the counter parties.
by the way if you think the US govt can't make good on this, have a look at some of these gems: http://money.cnn.com/news/storysupplement/economy/bailouttracker/
Investigators have now zeroed in on the suspect borrowing at the commodities and derivatives brokerage firm, which at the time of its collapse was run by Jon S. Corzine, these people said. At least some of the borrowed customer cash was used to pay off bad bets made by MF Global, regulators suspect, meaning the money is not simply missing. It is gone. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/mf-global-is-said-to-use-customer-cash-improperly/
Actually, I pulled it once I did a bit more research and realized the woman was a bit of a nutcase. Nonetheless, UNTIL the clients get the percentage of money back that you insist they will, call me extremely skeptical of this whole situation.
Nobody should have been expecting anything else but this. Without a doubt we are looking at prison terms for all of the c-level executives and anybody who took part in paying any of those debts with client funds. Would bet John Corzine knew completely, absolutely, and definitively about those transfers. One look in his e-mail is all it takes, and these documents need to be subpoened before they are deleted, destroyed, or any other way to bury incriminating evidence. I hope they've locked all of MF Global databases and integrated the investigation with the postal inspection services of our judicial branch.
"MF Global, like other brokers, can use customer cash if it puts up sufficient collateral." Gee that sounds like a great rule, doesn't it?