Federal regulators have discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars in customer money has gone missing from MF Global in recent days, prompting an investigation into the company's operations as it filed for bankruptcy on Monday, according to several people briefed on the matter.
The revelation of the missing money scuttled an 11th hour deal for MF Global to sell a major part of itself to a rival brokerage firm. MF Global, the powerhouse commodities brokerage run by Jon S. Corzine, had staked its survival on completing the deal.
Wait, that name is familiar. So who is Jon Corzine?
Now, the investigation threatens to tarnish the reputation of Jon S. Corzine, the former New Jersey Governor and Goldman Sachs chief who oversaw MF Global's demise, making it the first American victim of Europe's debt crisis.
Yeah, it's that Jon Corzine. I'm hesitant to get too schadenfreude-ish about this, because although Corzine has been an especially irritating figure in American politics for some time now, there's real money on the line here and a lot of people trusted him. In addition, MF Global will not be the only brokerage firm that gets tripped up in what's happening in Europe. Having said that, I suspect this story is going to get a lot more interesting in the coming days.
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