Jon Corzine may have contributed to MF Global’s collapse — but are regulators also to blame?
Bethany McLean, Reuters columnist and Vanity Fair contributing editor, joins “Viewpoint” host Eliot Spitzer to consider a House Republican report that blames former MF Global chairman and CEO Jon Corzine for the company’s collapse while criticizing the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for their lack of communication.
“[Corzine] just was so arrogant that he just ran over everybody’s warnings that MF Global wasn’t equipped to manage the kind of risks he was taking — either manage them substantively or liquidity-wise — and so the firm ended up collapsing and a lot of people lost their jobs as a result,” McLean says.
“The alleged details in the report of regulatory dysfunction are pretty shocking. Things that the regulators just simply didn’t share with each other that the other regulators would have needed to know and conflicting directions coming from the CFTC and the SEC in MF Global’s final days,” McLean says. “The even more shocking thing is that people have been talking about some sort of rational restructuring of all the multiple regulatory agencies for years, and it just cannot get done because regulators are as good at protecting their turf — OK, maybe not quite as good, but they’re almost as good at protecting their turf — as the big financial firms are.”
