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Curious what went on at MF Global? Me too, I guess, in a professional capacity. You know who won’t tell you? These guys:
One thing that we take very seriously here at Dealbreaker, starting now,* is the Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and this is known in the trade as “a graph made by lawyers.” Quick quiz: how much money went from Commodities Customers to Affiliates? Is it: Continue reading »
I’m not the only person who noticed that Mark Zuckerberg is going to have more than the usual amount of control over Facebook (Facebook Facebook Facebook), both unto his grave and beyond. As a conceptual matter I’m kind of down with that though I’m not going to, like, buy shares in the IPO or anything.* But my basic take is that, if you’re going to buy stock in in a poking machine that makes about a penny per user per day, you should be willing to trust Mark Zuckerberg. Because if you were the inventor of Facebook, you would have invented Facebook, or something.
The alternative to giving a hoodied 27-year-old complete control over all aspects of a multibillion dollar business is to have a team of professional managers being all professional and managing by committee and checking each others’ work. It is not clear what is better. I suspect Facebook would not be a $100 billion asset today if it had sold to Yahoo in 2006 though, also, no one has ever accused Yahoo of being professionally managed. But the point is that those are two distinct styles and there are arguments for both. Professionalism has much to recommend it but so does complete domination by one visionary; for instance, founder dominated firms outperform the market.
On the other hand there is a downside to dominant visionaries, as some (non-Zynga-based) hog farmers now know all too well: Continue reading »
The chief risk officer who was brought in to install risk management systems at MF Global after a rogue trading incident in February 2008 is expected to tell Congress Thursday he outlined his concerns about European sovereign debt trades in the fall of 2010…At the hearing, Michael Roseman is expected to say he “expressed my growing concerns with regard to the potential capital risk associated with the growing positions and began to express caution on the growing liquidity risk,” according to a copy of the testimony reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. In mid-September, Roseman told MF Global’s chief executive, Jon Corzine, that he would consult the firm’s board of directors on requests to increase limits on the European trades. According to his written testimony, Roseman is expected to say that by late October of 2010, the positions were approaching $3.5 billion to $4 billion. After discussing his concerns with Corzine and others, the risk scenarios he presented “were challenged as being implausible.” Roseman’s testimony doesn’t specify who aside from Corzine and the board he told of his concerns. [FINS]
“Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone,” but every banker also seems to forget the modern corollary, which is that, if you have to prove you are worthy of credit, however good may be your arguments, don’t do it over email. Here’s someone who forgot that and does it surprise you to find his name in the same sentence as “House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations”?:
A week before MF Global Holdings Ltd. collapsed, its chief financial officer told Standard & Poor’s in an e-mail that the futures broker had “never been stronger.”
S&P provided the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations with an excerpt of the e-mail from MF Global CFO Henri Steenkamp. S&P also informed the panel that Jon Corzine, then MF Global’s chief executive officer, met with its analysts on Oct. 20 to reassure them that his $6.3 billion bet on European sovereign debt was no threat to the firm, according to a Jan. 17 letter obtained by Bloomberg News.
U.S. lawmakers will turn their attention to the role of the ratings companies in the failure of MF Global at a Feb. 2 hearing after summoning Corzine, the former governor of New Jersey and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. co-chairman, to two hearings in December. S&P ranked MF Global as investment grade until its failure, while Moody’s downgraded it to junk status four days earlier.
“MF Global is in its strongest position ever,” Steenkamp told S&P on Oct. 24, according to the letter to Representative Randy Neugebauer, a Texas Republican, from Craig Parmelee, a managing director at S&P in New York.
Who can understand the workings of an MF Global? Not me. Apparently they had a money vaporizing device, which in its final days was being manned by employees not wholly familiar with its proper operation, and which caused some unpleasantness when it was aimed at clients’ money. Still to a first approximation it seems reasonable to think that poor foolish-sounding Steenkamp was basically right. MF Global had some assets and some liabilities and its assets exceeded its liabilities. It had a short-term reasonably safe bet on some European government bonds that proved reasonably profitable, and that bet was funded with matched-maturity funding that was reasonably stable until it wasn’t. Then everything went south, that matched-maturity funding was pulled, MF Global needed to sell assets and post more collateral to remain in business, and in the confusion someone accidentally turned on the vaporizer. Continue reading »
Former MF Global employees in Chicago recently had the chance to vent their frustration against Jon Corzine — by smacking him with a small wooden bat. At a post-Christmas party Dec. 29, former employees took turns smashing a star-shaped pinata with pictures of Corzine taped on it, according to people who attended the party. Unfortunately, those looking for the missing $1.2 billion in customer funds came up empty-handed: When the pinata broke open, all it contained was slips of paper with “IOU” written on them. A spokesperson for MF Global said the firm had no knowledge of this event. [FINS]
…on October 15, two weeks before MF Global filed for bankruptcy, Corzine and his wife, Sharon Elghanayan, were at a birthday party in Paris talking about a château they were about to buy in the South of France. “It’s not in Cap Ferrat,” one person recalls Elghanayan saying, perhaps to mitigate the extravagance. “To buy any decent château is at least a couple of million euros,” explains another person who was at the party, “and that is before the renovation with the air-conditioning and the new kitchen. Sharon was very excited. She said she was flying down there on Monday morning.” [Vanity Fair]
As you may have heard, today is Jon Corzine’s third day testifying in Washington about the whole MF Global thing. All morning and this afternoon have been devoted to questioning by the House Financial Services Committee, with a couple of the standard 15 minute recesses sprinkled in. In fact, there was one not too long ago. You know what Corzine uses his break time for? Grabbing a snack. Shooting the breeze. Taking a piss. Watching YouTube clips. Telling himself “You, got this, Jon,” in the bathroom mirror. You know what he doesn’t use it for? Being served with papers from some messenger boy on behalf of some jerk trying to sue him. Thinking about testing him on this? DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK. Continue reading »
