I would be glad to show a video of Bill Black discussing important financial matters such as this on a mainstream US video program but there don't seem to be any.
There were a number of disturbing things in Gary Gensler testimony to the Congress about the role of the CFTC in this. Some of these things are discussed here.
I doubt very much that justice will be done at MF Global. The Banks have been getting away with everything they have done so far, up to and including the blatant stealing of funds from customers that were being held on account, and not even subject to active trading margin.
He can try to pass the buck on this, and there is plenty of company in this on both sides of the aisle and in the media. But the ultimate responsibility for the handling of this falls on Barack Obama and his Administration. It happened on his watch, and it was their job to make it right. That is price of leadership.
He can continue to ignore it, plead ignorance, and even make excuses, but at the end of the day he should be ashamed at how this was handled, and the Congress and the media along with him.
I can only imagine what they would be saying if the President was George W. Bush, and Jon Corzine was his leading Republican fund raiser. With a few notable exceptions, largely solitary voices, where are the so-called progressives on this? Hypocrites!
I do not expect to see justice done here. There are too many powerful people and interests involved, and justice, being truth in action and not words, is not en vogue for misdeeds of the TBTF financial sector. We are way beyond that with this generation of vipers that has infested the Beltway for the past twenty years.
I would just like to see the stranded customers made whole for what was taken from them, and their long anxiety ended, which is what has happened promptly in every brokerage failure that I am aware of post WW II, including Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. Oh no, you just don't understand. It is different this time.
Yes, because of who is involved. How naive do they think the people are? If the individual customers had not banded together and taken proactive legal measures, the system would have had their way with them. Almost all the good that has come of this wretched affair is due to the actions of the people in the Commodity Customer Coalition, and not those sworn to protect them.
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one,And the public relations campaign of spin, leaks, and misinformation that has enveloped this financial scandal since day one is an absolute disgrace and a failure of the greater part of the independent press.
an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
Edmund Burke
So far they have ignored it. Next they will be ridiculing those who call for reform such as the Occupy Wall Street movement as ignorant and rabble. But reform is inevitable, it will happen, or there will be no sustainable economic recovery, and no peace.
This is Obama's Hurricane Katrina. And viewed not as an isolated incident, but in the context of all that has happened, it is an effect of the credibility trap that grips the nation's leadership, of both financialized political parties.