Jon Corzine Would Be A Wall Street God If He Could've Held On To His Trade
As Deutsche Bank analysts Stuart Kirk, Rineesh Bansal, and
Gaël Gunubu point out in a note, the bond market ultimately turned in Corzine's favor.
From the note:
Spanish officials must giggle at being able to borrow at 4 per cent for half a century. One man surely sobbing into his beard however is ex-MF Global boss Jon Corzine... How tantalizingly close he was to being hailed the cleverest man on the planet. Just one month later Italian yields peaked, then Portugal's did, then Spain's - before Mario Draghi's speech began the mother of all bond rallies.
So Corzine was right, but his timing was wrong - and his execution was poor, to say the very least.
The former New Jersey Governor and CEO of Goldman Sachs was brought down not only by his highly levered $7 billion position, but also by the scandal that followed.
After MF Global collapsed, it was investigated for illegally using customer funds to avoid what was ultimately a $1 billion margin call.
The details revealed in the investigation were brutal. According to one former employee, the final days at MF Global were a "total cluster---." Corzine and other executives were called to testify before Congress about the affair.
Last November the firm was ordered to pay $1.2 billion to wronged customers and handed an additional $100 million in fines to the CFTC.