MF Global

Indeed, the MF Global failure suggests that the US and EU banking systems may be facing a far larger problem than even the most bearish analysts suspect.

While certainly very much ironic, considering that his purchase is now completely worthless, the news that Interactive Brokers' CEO Thomas Peterffy, who up until the 11th hour was expected to be the buyer of the now liquidating exchange only to unwind the deal upon discovery of hundreds of millions in missing commingled funds, bought 8 million shares of MF Global stock for his own account is certain to raise many alarm flags at whatever disgraceful farce passes for US regulators these days. As a reminder, "the week before MF Global filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 31, the New York-based company’s shares fell 67 percent to $1.20. They have since dropped to 14 cents." So when did Peterffy start buying? "I started to buy the stock as it went down,” Peterffy, chief executive officer of Greenwich, Connecticut-based Interactive Brokers, said today in a phone interview. He said he still owns the shares. “You win a few, you lose a few." We wonder if David Sokol shares the same sentiment.

Earlier today, Jefferies made it all too clear that anyone found holding any PIIGS sovereign debt exposure, net AND gross, will be promptly punished by the market all the way down to the circuit breaker halt, until such party promptly offloads its GROSS exposure to some other greater fool, in the process gutting its entire flow trading desk. Courtesy of Bloomberg we may now know who the market will focus its attention on next: "Barclays has $12.5 billion sovereign risk, $20.1 billion of risk to corporations and another $10.2 billion to financial institutions. It also has $66.6 billion of exposure in its retail business, 86% of which is to Spain and Italy. Group and corporate-level risk mitigation (sovereign CDS, total return swaps) may reduce these exposures." Or, as the Jefferies case study demonstrated so vividly, it may not, and the only option will now be for Barclays to post daily releases with CUSIP breakdowns which will achieve nothing until Barclays follows in Jefferies footsteps and liquidates (at what is likely a substantial loss) all or at least half of its gross exposure. Thank you Egan Jones for starting a hot-potato avalanche that will keep banks honest. And woe to the last PIIGS sovereign debt bagholder.

If you are a former MF Global account and you have your account transferred over to RJ O'Brien, or many others, you will have no choice but to fork out a bunch of cash to keep positions on, according to a statement awaiting all such accounts on the RJO website, or else be next in line for broad liquidations. To wit: "Former MF Global customers transferred to R.J. O’Brien were delivered with approximately 75% of the maintenance margin requirement related to their accounts. As a result, every former MF Global account faces a margin call. No excess equity was transferred." Naturally the next question is "Why are we not getting 100% of our MMR (Maintenance Margin) from the exchange?" And the answer: "This is an agreement between the trustee and CME Group. Please visit www.mfglobaltrustee.com for further information or questions." So, in addition to lowering initial margin for everyone, not just MF Global clients, did the CME iron out preferential terms over other exchanges and get larger equity of the account transfer than most? Because somehow we doubt that RJ O'Brien is the only exchange that is greeting their clients with this particular notice.

The great sage Albert Einstein suggested that repeating something and expecting a different outcome is “insanity.”  The NY Fed is repeating its reliance on primary dealers to be transparent and accurate and to do so voluntarily.

The MF Global probe begins. Here are the broad scope details from Bloomberg

• Trustee liquidating MF Global brokerage has started a probe into the company’s failure after getting a judge’s go-ahead. To protect books and records, forensic accountants are “securing” offices in NYC, Chicago, trustee James Giddens said in a statement today.
• "Significant’’ numbers of brokerage accounts being transferred
• Individual accounts will probably be transferred next week
• Giddens, team will work weekend on bulk transfers

As readers will recall, it was only 2 years after the Lehman filing, did Anton Valukas discover such critical mainstays of modern banking fraud as Repo 105. Alas, we do not hold much hope here, at least in the beginning, and certainly not before the FBI is involved.

Jon Corzine is gone, and as we expected, will not collect a single penny from his $12+ million severance. Statement from the MF board: "The Board of Directors of MF Global Holdings Ltd. announced the resignation of Jon S. Corzine from all posts at MF Global. Mr. Corzine has confirmed that he will not seek severance payments in connection with his resignation. Edward L. Goldberg, the lead director of the Board of Directors, and Bradley I. Abelow, the Company¹s President and Chief Operating Officer, will continue in their current positions." And here is Jon's personal announcement: "I have voluntarily offered my resignation to the Board of Directors of MF Global.  This was a difficult decision, but one that I believe is best for the firm and its stakeholders. I feel great sadness for what has transpired at MF Global and the impact it has had on the firm's clients, employees and many others. I intend to continue to assist the Company and its Board in their efforts to respond to regulatory inquiries and issues related to the disposition of the firm's assets." Now, as to how he will avoid questioning by the federal authorities, that is a different matter entirely...

Was it just two weeks ago when we penned "Another Quarter, Another Blatant Window Dressing By The Primary Dealer Banks To Make Their Balance Sheets Seem Strong", the same post in which we said, "We have made it clear time and again, that this chart demonstrates nothing short of the end of quarter window dressing, when PDs convert their asset holdings into cash to make their Tier 1 Capital much more robust than it truly is. After all, none other than JPM and Citi were praising just how prepared for Basel III they are with their "sterling" capitalization ratios... which were only sterling courtesy of precisely the highlighted window dressing which occurs each and every quarter. We expect nothing less from Bank of America and Morgan Stanley when they report their own numbers in the coming days. We also expect the regulators to do absolutely nothing to prevent this blatant abuse of fiduciary duty which has no other purpose than to hide the true sad state of America's banking system." Ironically, we have just found out that had regulators not only listened to us over the two years we have been pointing this out, but also done something on it, MF Global would likely not have filed for bankruptcy. Here is the WSJ, confirming all our worst fears: "For the past two years, MF Global Holdings Ltd. may have disguised its debt levels to investors by temporarily slashing the debt it was carrying before publicly reporting its finances each quarter, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal. The activity, referred to in the financial industry as "window dressing," suggests that the troubled financial firm was shouldering more risk and using more borrowed funds to facilitate its trading than investors could easily detect from the firm's regulatory filings. And scene: but wait, there's more. As we have shown over and over and over, this has continued for 8 quarters in a row since Lehman first exposed this criminal activity. Sure enough, another company just went bankrupt because of the SEC's gross and criminal negligence, incompetence, and overall corruption.

After reading the following just released announcement from Bloomberg stating that "the U.S. SEC is reviewing trades in MF Global Holdings Ltd. convertible bonds to determine whether some investors sold the debt based on confidential information before the firm’s demise, two people with direct knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg’s Joshua Gallu and Shannon D.Harrington" we are quite stunned: how on earth will the SEC, which is the official depository of the dumbest and most corrupt people on earth, go about doing this? And what about what is an already confirmed act of gross fiduciary duty breach in the form of commingling client accounts: is that one too complicated for the SEC, so it has to proceed with this ridiculous diversion and pretend it is doing something when the biggest criminal is right there starting everyone, especially those from New Jersey, in the face?

We find it supremely ironic that one former Goldmanite, in this case the CFTC's Gary Gensler, takes credit (doing the people's work this time?) for allowing the failure of what is now a documented criminal enterprise, MF Global, run by another former Goldmanite, Jon Corzine, and claiming this was nothing less than an example of "Freedom To Fail". The NYT quotes Gensler: "This was an example of a financial institution having the freedom to fail,” he said in response to questioning from Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. “I don’t think there’s any taxpayer money behind this.”" No, Gary, there is just client money behind this. Anywhere between $700 million and $1.5 billion. Money that was stolen, and had MF global been bailed out, you, the CFTC and the US Government would have been complicit in a prima facie felony. So please - no need for the pathetic pandering to the lowest common denominator that only years of Goldman tenure can hone to this level of perfection. The only question is whether the CFTC, together with that other corrupt regulator which oddly enough is not yet run by a third Goldman alum, has the "freedom to jail."

The temptation to compare any financial institution’s failure to those that preceded the 2008 crisis and panic are reasonable. It is easy to classify MF Global as 2011’s “Lehman” event, just as it was to use the same term to describe Dexia a few weeks ago. The use of the term “this year’s Lehman” is somewhat misplaced simply because its users are looking for an event that kicks off another crisis or panic. Instead of using “Lehman” to describe a potential inflection point that propels the crisis into panic, it might be better to see MF Global as AIG. The comparison to AIG is not to say that MF Global was as interconnected, that its failure will be as devastating, or that it is the straw that breaks the European camel’s back. The urge to see the past in the present is historically valid, but it will never be exactly alike (Mark Twain had this right). Rather I think the comparison is useful in that AIG taught the wider world what was really rotten at the core of modern finance, namely hidden risks that were shockingly existential. MF Global’s failure importantly shows that none of the lessons have been heeded in the days since, providing a somewhat unique window into the real dangers that still lurk hidden in the shadows. More than that, though, MF Global demonstrates an obvious shortcoming of the financial system as it relates to the real economy.

Even as we hear rumblings that the MF fire is spreading, and the associated auditor of the now infamous former Primary Dealer is about to get in serious hot water, the bankrupt company itself continues to dig itself an ever deeper grave. Because according to a just filed motion by the MF Global liquidating trustee, it seems that the gross criminal activity by the company may have been orders of magnitude bigger than anyone has expected. To wit: "As a result of the apparent segregation violations and the suspension of clearing privileges, more than 150,000 customer accounts essentially were frozen on October 31, 2011, of which more than 50,000 accounts were regulated commodities customer accounts. The CME estimates that MFGI’s current segregated funds requirement is approximately $5.45 billion. Moreover, the total amount of MFGI customer segregated funds on deposit at the CME is approximately $2.5 billion, and the clearing-level segregated collateral is approximately $1.5 billion or approximately 60 percent of the MFGI customer segregated funds on deposit at the CME." Doing some quick inverse addition and we get a (w)hole of $5.45 less $2.5 less $1.5 or $1.45 billion. In other words, the theft by MF Global was not stealing hunderds of millions form its customers: it has stolen a whopping $1.5 billion! For those confused, this is not a rogue loss of $1.5 billion, something which was enough to send UBS' Kweku to prison. This is outright theft resulting from illegally commingled accounts. Our only question is will $1.5 billion in theft be enough for the first real perp walk of an Obama-friendly Wall Street executive?

Now that the affdavit of MF Global COO Bradley Abelow has been filed, we finally get the (partial and quite watered down) inside scoop of just what the events were that brought the company to its knees, and what specifically were the precipitating catalysts that ultimately led to the Halloween massacre. The relevant part begins with section E, paragraph 33, on page 13. "As a global financial services firm, MF Global is materially affected by conditions in the global financial markets and worldwide economic conditions. On September 1, 2011, MF Holdings announced that FINRA informed it that its regulated U.S. operating subsidiary, MFGI, was required to modify its capital treatment of certain repurchase transactions to maturity collateralized with European sovereign debt and thus increase its required net capital pursuant to SEC Rule 15c3-1. MFGI increased its required net capital to comply with FINRA’s requirement...." Read on.

It is now 100% safe to say that the 100 basis point "springing rate clause" in the 6.25% bond indenture (that never saw even one coupon payment before the company filed) should Corzine join the White House will never be triggered. As NBC reports, Federal prosecutors and the FBI are set to join the inquiry into what happened to hundreds of millions of dollars invested with a securities firm headed by former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, officials familiar with the case told NBC New York. The Justice Department involvement comes as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Future Trading Commission have said their own inquiry is underway into the collapse of the brokerage firm, MF Global Holdings Ltd. The head of the Chicago Mercantile exchange said Tuesday that the firm broke rules requiring it to keep clients' money and company funds in separate accounts. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara declined to comment Tuesday as did DOJ spokesmen in New York and Washington. An FBI spokesman also declined to comment.

......Uhhhhh, WTF?