Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Madharry who wrote (46097)	1/8/2012 7:16:57 PM
From: Spekulatius	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 78611

>>The MF GLOBAL question of what happened to customer deposits still hasnt been answered. This is the greatest scandal as an investor that I have been witness to. A special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate both the MF GLOBAL executives and their regulators. The bankruptcy took place four months ago and many accounts are short 1/3 of their value, and there are still no answers. Amazing.<< The MF global story is very unsettling, first of all the fact that a brokerage house can misappropriate customers funds and gamble when them and second that now 2 month into bankruptcy, hundred of millions in customers funds are still unaccounted for. I believe the above is going to turn out very destabilizing to the system, because at the slightest indication of trouble, brokerage account holders are likely to pull funds. This is essentially what happened to the financial crisis in 2008 where the short term funding for the investment banks was not available and it is now very likely to happen again if their is a crisis in the financial markets. I just watched the movie "Inside job" yesterday. There is really not much new for most here in it but I found interesting is that academia and even fed governeurs are corrupted too, because they paper their write are in many cases contract work for financial interest group. For example Ex Fed chief Mishkin (who resigned in August 2008 for the important task to revise a textbook as he claims) wrote papers praising the financial stability and deregulation in Iceland in 2006 that were paid by the Economic development council of Iceland. This was undisclosed on the paper. It seems that working in the financial sector or even economics is a race to the bottom in terms of ethics and those that arrive first make the most money. I think the Europeans are doing it right and put a tax on many financial transactions. Of course this will lead to some operations going someplace else (HF trading for example) but I think that is OK, because when the whole things blows up next time, the new locality can clean up the mess (or so they hope).