As FORTUNE contributor Leah McGrath Goodman writes:
"Big institutional investors are getting a taste of what many frustrated taxpayers experienced during the financial crisis: Being on the hook for losses of a major financial firm against their wishes."No matter how the "major media" and even (so-called!) "liberal" writers, bloggers, and 'Democratic' party activists try to spin Barack Obama's three years of malfeasance, Mr. Obama has done NOTHING to insure American taxpayers that they are getting "paid back" for the "bailouts" trillions-of-dollars that the Rubin, Summers, Paulson, Geithner, Greenspan, Bernanke (=Goddamn-Sach + JP Morgan = Fed) banksters have extorted out of American taxpayers.
This is nothing more nor less than REWARDING bankers for failure, bankruptcy, insolvency... and fraud.
Where President Clinton ushered in the new round of Bob Rubin + Phil Gramm (et al) "deregulation;"
...and President George W. Bush institutionalized the "license to loot, pillage, rape, and plunder" financial frauds inherent in unregulated "derivatives" creation (aka "ENRON ACCOUNTING")...
...it has been Mr. Obama's insanely, blatantly corrupt presidency that has INSTITUTIONALIZED, not only the wholesale theft from individual investors, institutions, and pension funds... but under Mr. Obama, like a vacuum cleaner Wall Street's mega-bank swindlers are now devouring every scrap of investor wealth they can find, in what can only be described as LEGALIZED LARCENY.
Not that the Rethuglican Party is any better - they are as in-bed with the Wall Street American-jobs-outsourcing, loan-sharking, pension-raiding, stock market pumping-and-dumping, currency attacking, nations gutting "traders" as the Obama-Pelosi-Schumer "Democrats" are.
It's just that Mr. Obama is in position to do SOMETHING to protect American investors, savers, pensioners, and defrauded workers... and this he steadfastly REFUSES to do - - - year after year, month after month, week after week, the clueless or insanely corrupt Mr. Obama REFUSES TO NOTICE TITANIC FRAUDS in America's vital, critical financial markets...
...he is too busy having lunch with (JP Morgan CEO) Jamie Dimon, or taking legalized bribes "campaign donations" from Goddamn-Sachs and other Wall St. fraudsters...
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ALL roads for the "missing" ($600+) billions - investor funds "missing" from INVESTOR CASH ACCOUNTS at MF Global - point to JP MORGAN 'bank.'
Barack Obama and his INSANELY CORRUPT appartchiks - Mary Schapiro at the SEC, former Goddamn-Sachs partner Gary Gensler at the CFTC, Eric Holder at the Department of 'Justice' - REFUSE TO NOTICE:
MF Global: The Mess that Keeps Getting MessierEven this informative Fortune/cnn article uses the typical "mainstream media" tactic to WHITEWASH, or at least DOWNPLAY, the notion that these were CUSTOMERS' OWN MONEY in PRIVATE, 'secured' accounts which MF Global executives - led by former Goddamn-Sachs CHAIRMAN, and former 'Democrat' NJ Governor Jon Corzine - STOLE from those funds, and used as MF Global cash - they RAIDED "segregated" client accounts, and used client's money as MF Global money.
By Leah McGrath Goodman, contributor, Fortune
November 21, 2011, http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/11/21/mf-global-bankruptcy/
As the questions and conflicts in the MF Global bankruptcy pile up, investors are pooling their resources to get a seat at the table.
FORTUNE -- Big institutional investors are getting a taste of what many frustrated taxpayers experienced during the financial crisis: Being on the hook for losses of a major financial firm against their wishes.
This time, of course, it's MF Global at the center of the dispute. A once-trusted brokerage with roots dating back to the 1700s, MF Global is now a bankrupt firm suspected of misappropriating customer funds to the tune of at least $600 million.
More than two weeks after MF Global's Halloween bankruptcy filing, there are more questions than answers and a surfeit of conflicts in an investigation that should be aiming to restore the public's confidence, but is doing the opposite. On Monday, the bankruptcy trustee for the case announced that there may be much more than $600 million missing from MF Global [privately owned cash & stock] accounts -- perhaps as much as $1.2 billion.
Hundreds of millions of dollars of trading capital and collateral were frozen without notice, dramatically disrupting the derivatives marketplace and ushering in a phalanx of federal prosecutors, regulatory agencies and forensic accountants working around the clock to determine where the missing money is. This, after a lawyer for MF Global assured a New York judge earlier this month "there is no shortfall."
What's different about this case? One hedge fund executive summed it up best: "What is scary about MF Global is that there is no political will in this country to look out for people. Let this be a lesson that, if someone tries to steal from you, there is no one who is going to save you. I mean it is literally the most frightening thing that can happen in finance."
Led by a sense of outrage -- as well as the conviction that if they don't look out for themselves, no one else will -- investors have been pooling information and banding together to defend themselves for weeks. The most prominent group has been the Commodity Customer Coalition, spearheaded by James Koutoulas, chief executive of Typhon Capital Management, who's representing a few thousand former MF Global clients. Traders have also taken to the blogosphere, including Andrew Abraham of Abraham Investment Management, who's written extensively about how investors have been ignored, refunded only partially and in lopsided fashion and ought to complain to officials in Washington.
It looks as though the pushback could finally be working: Thursday U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn approved a $520 million cash distribution to about 23,000 MF Global customers, which will take around a week to disburse.
Roads lead back to J.P. Morgan
But a list of contentious issues remains, and at the top is the missing money. While hundreds of millions of dollars have turned up in a custodial account at J.P. Morgan (JPM), none of those funds have been restored to MF Global clients, who should have been first in line to get them. Investors have been crying foul, and so they should. Customer accounts are supposed to be kept strictly segregated from a brokerage firm's money. According to the CME Group's (CME) Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the world's dominant futures market and the designated "self-regulatory organization" of MF Global, those rules were violated.
Although MF Global owes J.P. Morgan $1.2 billion as an unsecured creditor, clients of MF Global whose funds are still missing should not have to beg J.P. Morgan for relief. "We're simply asserting that if MF Global commingled funds from customer accounts, or cannot properly account for them, J.P. Morgan can't lay claim to those funds as if they were their own," Koutoulas has asserted. Already, trading volumes have taken a hit because investors have been deprived of their own capital, socked with margin calls, or found live trades in limbo. According to the bankruptcy trustee, more than 3 million positions with a notional value of $100 billion were left in the lurch.... (cont'd)
This has always been a weak link in the democratic regulation and oversight of banks - when you put your money into a bank, they instantly regard your money as their reserves - but this legalized, now institutionalized theft, has Barack Obama's complacent, conflicted, insanely corrupted signature all over it.
