MF Global

If we want to understand what went wrong in the pilfering of customer property, where was Ms. Laurie Ferber during the Senate Agricultural Hearings on MF Global?

In April 2007, former New Jersey governor, 'honorable', Jon Corzine had an altercation with a Garden State Parkway guardrail. A year later, he addressed a bevy of reporters at the swanky Drumthwacket mansion and expressed appreciation for “family, friends, and the fragility of life.” During his recovery period, he advocated seatbelt safety, before returning to New Jersey's budget, extracting $500 million in austerity measures from farmers, educators, and environmentalists, and hiking tolls on New Jersey roadways. On the one-year anniversary of his accident, his chief-of-staff, Bradley I. Abelow declared,  “Corzine has returned to his former self as a thorough and exacting boss.” (Italics mine.) Fast forward to the current MF Global flameout. Abelow shifted to Corzine’s Chief Operating Officer. And not only did Corzine ratchet up the ante on ways to really piss off farmers, but after several days of engaging in verbal dodge ball with Congress, this ‘thorough and exacting boss’ maintained his Forest Gump type cloak of secrecy regarding the stolen $1.2 billion of his customers’ segregated money. After days of political-reality TV, we knew nothing more about its evaporation. Corzine and his stewards, Abelow and Chief Financial Officer, Henri Steenkamp, executed a perfect chorus of  ‘I don’t recalls’, ‘I didn’t intends’ and ‘the butler did its’.

On Friday, as the Eurobond market was briefly soaring, we attributed the move to sentiment that was best captured by a note out of Morgan Stanley's govvie desk: "The carry trade is happening, there is no doubt about it. In SPGBs (45bps tighter t0) we estimate 15-20bn (incl 6bn auction) of buying from domestic mid sized banks and cajas THIS WEEK (500mm is usual 2way trading volume per day). We are seeing the same starting with Italian mid tier banks in BTPs today (35bps tighter t0). Also Ireland seems to be very well bid up to 2016 maturities (75bps tighter on day). While Huw and Laurence anticipated this in their research piece on the LTRO from yesterday, we certainly did not expect it to be this intense and front loaded, this is the strongest buying we have seen all year, it feels a lot like QE." In simple summary, what MS was hoping and praying (because if clients are buying, MS is selling) its clients would believe, is that European banks would promptly forget that Europe has trillions of rolling over financial corporate debt, and instead of focusing on generating the cash needed to pay down maturities if no buyer stepped up, banks would somehow re-lever, by buying up even more sovereign debt in hopes of catching a few bps of carry, and completely ignoring the "#1 issue at the heart of the Eurozone crisis"^TM - the fundamental supply/demand paper maturity mismatch. Not to mention that any statement which needs the redundant "there is no doubt about it" is a 100% lie. It took the market about 3 hours to wake up from its zombified state and to do a 180, proceeding to rapidly sell off European debt following the realization that the Morgan Stanely thesis is nothing but a purely self-serving lie. The folks at Reuters IFR explain why MS completely botched this one up, and why Eurobanks are finally starting to wake up to the realization that the MF Global trade just may not be coming to town.

This goes for MFG's gold & silver customers too, who otherwise would have been put ahead of creditors.

More shock and awe, in case you're not mad enough yet. 

The Santa Claus rally may finally be here. In an ironic twist, as Corzine's firm is in bankruptcy and he is at personal risk of prosecution, we are rallying because for all intents and purposes, the ECB has allegedly told banks to load up on the MF Global trade.  Banks are supposedly using ECB money to buy up short dated Italian and Spanish paper. Corzine must be bitter - his trade is the latest bailout.

What I said in the title, well... sort of...

In order to get to the bottom of every collapse (or death), a forensic analysis of the last minutes of any transition from life to death has to be perormed. So far, we have only had broad strokes of the key events in the last days of MF Global as obviously many of them will implicate the management team in gross criminal behavior. Until now, when courtesy of the CME we have received a full breakdown of every key events in the chronology of MF Global's last days on earth, starting with October 24, and the rating agency downgrade of the futures broker (the same catalyst incidentally that started the AIG death spiral waterfall... and yet clueless pundits will tell you the ratings are totally irrelevant), and ending with the firm's filing for bankruptcy protection. Anyone who has any interest in the MF Global collapse, which incidentally should be anyone who has capital in third party possession and thus has counterparty risk, should read this narrative from first to last bullet.

Derivatives, unlike stocks where the equation has always been murky, are for the most part zero-sum products: one's gain is someone else's loss (net of commissions) unless of course the entire system collapses in a daisylinked chain reaction (think AIG). And MF Global's bankruptcy, by dint of being a derivatives broker, and the resulting massive losses to both shareholders and clients, means that some entity, on the other side of all these failed bets, made off like a bandit. Which bring us to a rather disturbing theory proposed by Walter Burien of CAFR1.com who has floated the rather the chilling idea, and what some may call an outright conspiracy theory, that by scuttling MF, Corzine effectively helped some shell company (or companies) which were controlled by a "cabal" of his closest confidants (we will let readers come up with their own theories who the former CEO of Goldman Sachs may have been close with) to make the offsetting profit that resulted from the accelerated and massive losses borne by MF's stakeholders in the vicious liquidation. As Burien says: "A government and media cover up would just focus on MFG's loss. A true and open investigation would be focused on "who" took the other side of the coin; the profit." And now that we know that Corzine allegedly lied to the Senate, just how much deeper does his transgression go, and did his really hand over the company on a silver platter to some anonymous "Hold Co" by taking on massive risks he knew were going to blow up in his face, albeit knowing the "other" side of the trade would compensate him for it? After all, Corzine's legacy may have been forever tarnished, but if there was one thing the man knew after all those mostly successful years at Goldman, it was risk. So did he really blow up MF on a idiotic risk miscalculation bet within two years of joining, purely by mistake, or is there something more?

Not an hour after we asked who gave permission to MF Global estate to sell Italian bonds to JPM (which was a lender to MF Global, discussed extensively here) at preferential terms and we get the following headline from Bloomberg:

JPMORGAN ACTIONS AS MF LENDER LIKELY TO BE PROBED: LIQUIDATOR

Needless to say, we are quite happy. Someone who isn't however, are JPM's shareholders, as the stock just took out the lows on the news.

We already knew previously that shortly after it filed for bankruptcy, George Soros bought $2 billion in Italian bonds from the bankrupt MF Global. One thing we did not know was the terms of the purchase. Today, the WSJ has disclosed another facet of the bankruptcy which like Lehman will expose gigabytes of dirt on the corrupt US financial system. Namely, that after liquidating, MF sold Italian bonds - the culprit that ultimately led to the bank's bankruptcy - to none other than JP Morgan and "one large hedge fund."So far so good. Where it gets disturbing is that as the WSJ discloses, "buyers paid about 89 cents on the dollar for the Italian bonds, compared with a market price of about 94 cents at the time, according to the trader who bought them...Today, those bonds trade at more than 96 cents, according to Tradeweb." Our question is first, why did the bankrupt MF Global estate proceed to unload post-filing assets and under whose discretion: after all the company had entered bankruptcy, and it is up to the estate, which includes bondholders and other stakeholders to determine what assets and under what conditions, can be liquidated. Did MF Global believe that the same exemption from the law that it apparently thought was applicable to its pre-petition, was also valid under bankruptcy? Because if the firm did not get prior-permission form a bankruptcy judge to liquidate these assets, this is an act far worse than commingling and even the firesale of Lehman's US Brokerage to Barclays for pennies on the dollar - this is flaunting bankruptcy law front and center. Secondly, and perhaps just as important, who on the estate agreed to give JPM a 5% explicit discount to what the article notes was a fair price that is 5% higher and which by definition would have had bidders at that price. We hope someone in the Senate will take a quick look at this note, and the related WSJ article, and ask Messrs Corzine et al to provide some much needed clarity on this topic.

Update: the three MF Global stoog... pardon, former executives, are now testifying

Even though he has had several days in which to "review his notes", the follow up testimony by former MF Global CEO Jon Corzine to the Senate Agriculture Committee starting momentarily will be replete with "I don't recalls" and "to the best of my knowledge" and will be largely devoid of all content, suffice to say it was not his intention to break the main law of broker dealers- no commingling. It will be even worse because today he will be joined by MF global's CFO and COO as well, all of whom will be completely clueless once again, and needless to say, shocked, SHOCKED, that they stole billions from their clients. Watch the full webcast below.

Will the Senate step up and ask the tough questions, like why is a futures firm being liquidated under securities law and by someone with no experience with futures, whose firm shares MF Global's auditor?

There is NEVER just ONE roach!!!

That paper gold, in the form of electronic ones and zeros, typically used by various gold ETFs, or anything really that is a stock certificate owned by the ubiquitous Cede & Co (read about the DTCC here), is in a worst case scenario immediately null and void as it is, as noted, nothing but ones and zeros on some hard disk that can be formatted with a keystroke, has long been known, and has been the reason why the so called gold bugs have always advocated keeping ultimate wealth safeguards away from any form of counterparty risk. Which in our day and age of infinite monetary interconnections, means virtually every financial entity. After all, just ask Gerald Celente what happened to his so-called gold held at MF Global, or as it is better known now: "General Unsecured Claim", which may or may not receive a pennies on the dollar equitable treatment post liquidation. What, however, was less known is that physical gold in the hands of the very same insolvent financial syndicate of daisy-chained underfunded organizations, where the premature (or overdue) end of one now means the end of all, is also just as unsafe, if not more. Which is why we read with great distress a just broken story by Bloomberg according to which HSBC, that other great gold "depository" after JP Morgan (and the custodian of none other than GLD) is suing MG Global "to establish whether he or another person is the rightful owner of gold worth about $850,000 and silver bars underlying contracts between the brokerage and a client." The notional amount is irrelevant: it could have been $0.01 or $1 trillion: what is very much relevant however, is whether or not MF Global was rehypothecating (there is that word again), or lending, or repoing, or whatever you want to call it, that one physical asset that it should not have been transferring ownership rights to under any circumstances. Essentially, this is at the heart of the whole commingling situation: was MF Global using rehypothecated client gold to satisfy liabilities? The thought alone should send shivers up the spine of all those gold "bugs" who have been warning about precisely this for years. Because the implications could be staggering.