MF Global: $658 Million in Missing Customer Funds Found in Account at JP Morgan - Maybe

Government Of the People, By the People, and For the People

According to Bloomberg, $658.8 Million in what could be the 'missing customer funds' were 'found' today in an account at JP Morgan.

I know how it is.  Sometimes you forget to check your coat pockets and miscellaneous bank statements too. Sloppy bookkeeping. Tsk tsk. Oh well, just an honest mistake, right?

JP Morgan is one of the largest holders and agents of MF Global debt.

Jefferies Group underwrote MF's bond offering late this year.

MF Global’s commodity customer funds are reported to have a shortfall of $633 million, or about 11.6 percent, out of a segregated fund requirement of about $5.4 billion, according to the CFTC.

The CME is forcing the transfer of customer accounts to other brokers who are demanding double margin and issuing margin calls and forcing liquidation of positions, sometimes at widely fluctuating prices, according to some reports.

And in related news: SEC Investigates Insider Trading of MF Bonds

Hey, now that he has resigned from MF Global, perhaps Jon Corzine will consider taking Tired Timmy's place as Treasury Secretary. He is ex-Goldman you know.

Once you pass through the glass ceiling it becomes a glass floor.

Update:   JPM is now said by some news outlets to be denying that it is holding any MF Global customer money.  "It's MY milkshake. And I'm going to drink it all up!"  slurp slurp grnnfef.

When the going get tough, the weird turn pro.
  

The Disappointing Non Farm Payrolls Number: An Early Christmas 'Goose' Stuffed with Baloney

The Birth-Death Model was out of normal to the high side enough to raise a comment. This is shown in the first slide. Lately the BLS statisticians had not resorted to this and had actually been running at estimates a little more to what one might expect in a business slump.

The headline number without the Birth Death model, deseasonalized, showed negative growth.

So the truth is probably that jobs growth was flat to negative. But even that nugget of truth is liable to be lost in future revisions. I wonder if the desire to show growth will skew the statistics even further as we go forward.

Typical games are to play with the chain deflator in GDP to make it look better, and to play with seasonality, birth-death model, and rolling revisions in the payrolls numbers. And of course the tinkering with CPI is apparent to anyone not carrying an agenda who has looked into the mechanics of the changes in the past ten years.

But I suppose since Obama is speaking this morning at the G20, and telling Europe how to solve its banking and debt problems as the US has done, a passable grade on jobs growth was de rigueur pour le charlatan.

Next up, blame the slump on Europe after allowing your hedge funds, banks, and talking heads of the financial demimonde to drag them down, and then implement QE3 as a rescue plan.  Anything, rather than admit to the corruption in the system and then have to engage in meaningful reform. 

This is the nature of a credibility trap in the aftermath of the deep capture of politicians and their apparatus by the monied interests in a crony kleptocracy, teetering on the edge of general discovery.

If Obama is Hoover, which may be a somewhat flattering comparison to both,  then where on the political horizon is Roosevelt?  So far all that is offered to the voters is a choice amongst a freak show of corporate goons, imperious ideologues, and mini-Mussoliniani.

MF Global: The Mother of All Margin Calls

No, not the credit default implosion of the company itself. This is about the customers whose money was misappropriated.

The treatment of the non-insider investors and speculators by Wall Street is often shameful. This may be one of those times.

I think this has driven some of the recent trading, as the wise guys take advantage of the specs.

Brace for more odd swings in the markets.

Reuters
MF Global clients face day of reckoning as margins call
By Jeanine Prezioso and Karl Plume
NEW YORK/CHICAGO | Thu Nov 3, 2011 6:12pm EDT

(Reuters) - Call it the mother of all margin calls: Up to 50,000 former customers of bankrupt broker MF Global must find some $1 billion in additional collateral almost overnight, or be forced out of their trades.

Come Friday, with the mass transfer of commodity trading accounts from Jon Corzine's fallen firm to six of its erstwhile rivals, margin clerks will be wrapping up a reckoning of how much additional money is needed to cover millions of positions. Clients who can't quickly meet their margin will have to liquidate, making for a tumultuous day's trade.

A court order to move the trades late on Wednesday brought only marginal relief to clients who have been essentially frozen out of their funds and positions since Friday. While accounts will now be transferred more quickly, only 60 percent of the collateral will be moved to the new brokers.

That figure may yet fluctuate as brokers scramble on Thursday to work out the details, but the net result is still likely to mean that customers will be forced to post a hefty sum within a day or two. Many of MF Global's mainly small-scale clients may fail, triggering a mass liquidation of both short and long positions that may roil markets.

"I've got somewhere in the region of 8,000 positions. We can't afford to double margin those sorts of positions," said Tom Wacker, a proprietary gold futures trader in New York. "If we can't get our positions transferred they're going to be liquidated and we're going to lose a lot of money."

Eventually, in days or weeks, the remainder of the money should be returned. The $600 million that regulators say MF Global may have misappropriated from customers could remain outstanding, but that is less than a tenth of its funds.

In the meantime, however, brokers are unlikely to extend loans to new, unfamiliar customers to make up the margin gap -- and in some cases may simply refuse to take them at all.

"We are going to require full margin on our accounts," says Sean O'Connor, chief executive of INTL FCStone, the second-smallest of the six futures commission merchants (FCMs)selected to take the accounts....

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - A Pervasive Sense of Disestablishment

"Terror... often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment: that things are in the unmaking."

Stephen King

Big up day for the metals.

I do not care for their synchronicity with stocks. So many assets are now correlated to a global reflationary event, and the markets are overly sensitive to headlines. That makes these markets highly dangerous.

What is happening with MF Global and the US futures markets is a disgrace. But hypocrisy and betrayal are the temper of the times.

"By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes."

William Shakespeare, Macbeth