The blunt trauma that JPMorgan was implicated in the missing millions from segregated accounts in Jon Corzine's bankrupt MF Global may have passed but the memory lingers, especially for all those whose cash is still locked up somewhere in vapor space. Yet one event that may tear the scab that patiently was healing, courtesy of a Copperfield market full of distractions such as JPM's CIO fiasco, Lieborgate, oh and, Europe, right off is the recent bankruptcy of Peregrine Financial, aka PFG, whose story we first broke [9], and which just as we suspected, has promptly become the second coming of MF Global, as at least $200 million has "evaporated." It is thus with little surprise that we find that the first party of interest is none other than JPMorgan [10], which together with various other banks, will be the target of a subpoena by the PFG trustee. How shocking will it be to find that Dimon's company is once again implicated in this particular episode of monetary vaporization.
From Bloomberg [11]:
The trustee liquidating Peregrine Financial Group Inc. asked a judge for authority to subpoena the defunct futures brokerage’s banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Citigroup Inc. (C) for information about transfers from segregated accounts and proprietary accounts.
Citing a lawsuit by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission against the company and founder Russell Wasendorf Sr. over misappropriation of customer funds, the trustee said he needs records from “various financial institutions” to identify “abnormalities” in the company’s records.
The trustee liquidating Peregrine Financial Group Inc. asked a judge for authority to subpoena the defunct futures brokerage’s banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Citigroup Inc. (C) for information about transfers from segregated accounts and proprietary accounts.
Citing a lawsuit by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission against the company and founder Russell Wasendorf Sr. over misappropriation of customer funds, the trustee said he needs records from “various financial institutions” to identify “abnormalities” in the company’s records.
And while Jamie Dimon may have to spend another 2-3 hours before his muppets explaining how a few hundred million in PFG cash just may have ended up on his balance sheet, with nobody gaining anything, except for C-Span once again beating all other TV channels in the 10 am-12 pm block, the one definitive winner from this, and all the other unraveling financial fraud is more than clear:
[The trustee] asked the judge to set up procedures for paying his fees and expenses, and said he is seeking to hire as bankruptcy adviser Shaw Gussis Fishman Glantz Wolfson & Towbin LLC, the law firm where works, at rates of as much as $650 an hour.
This is money that ultimately would have gone to creditors and clients of the firm in liquidation. Instead it will go to funding yet another witch hunt which will achieve absolutely nothing, however it will, briefly, hopes of a few thousand traders and farmers who had entrusted their money to a criminal whom the CFTC could not catch for 20 years. All those hopes will, in the end, be dashed because if there is one thing the past 4 years have taught us, is that in America the bigger the crime, the greater the golden parachute.