Few of the financial titans who ran firms into the ground over the past decade are as deeply connected on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C., as Jon Corzine, onetime New Jersey governor and U.S. senator and the former CEO of both Goldman Sachs and the now-defunct brokerage house MF Global. A testament to that may…
Posted: March 31st, 2015 | Author: admin | Filed under: Jon Corzine, MF Global | Tags: Jon Corzine, MF Global | 2 Comments »
Despite being in my fourth decade in and around the financial services industry, I continue to be amazed how little the public comprehends to the extent how they continuously get ripped-off.
What Corzine did is criminal in my book and if not for the very connections mentioned in this article, an ordinary man would be staring at a long prison sentence.
But what Corzine did is “minor” compared to perhaps the greatest unprosecuted financial scam in the history of mankind. The financial crisis in 2008 has been investigated and reported to have been caused by many financial institutions knowingly selling bad mortgage products, and then actually taking the other side of what they sold to their customers. To this day, no serious upper management has been prosecuted and found guilty.
I think if the public understood in terms they could appreciate, there would have been a far bigger uproar.
What these financial people did would be like hearing on the news tonight that leading automobile manufacturers knowingly built cars that were going to crash, and then bought life insurance on the drivers they sold their cars to so they could collect when their car crashes and the driver dies.
Today, legal thievery continues despite major media coverage a year ago when it was uncovered that financial firms spent hundreds of millions of dollars to lay fiber optics so they could get in front of stock orders; clip what they are set to buy, and then put it back out for sale at a penny or two higher. All this in less than one second.
Again, because the public doesn’t comprehend the technical terms, they can’t appreciate the cunningness of this act. It’s like these financial people heard you were going food shopping; got to see your shopping list, went to the store and bought your list and then put it back on the shelf for a penny or two higher. In this case, it’s still legal to do this on Wall Street.
I’m certainly not proud of every single thing I did in 30+ years, but Corzine and so many others continue to make tens of billions of dollars off the general public and little or nothing ever really happens to curtail or end it.
Meanwhile… what’s new with Andrew Lucas? a good guy that was sucked into a bad real-estate investment by a low-life banker, like Corzine who also like Corzine goes free at Andrew’s expense.