The point is that investment is gambling. Every investment comes with some level of risk. Your money is down at the Great Casino the second you hand it to a broker.
You’re not seeing this correctly. The money MF Global took from their customers’ accounts wasn’t used to gamble on an investment that would have benefited the customers, it was used to maintain a prop trade, the profits of which would have gone solely to MF Global had it worked out. MF Global didn’t fritter away the money on behalf of their clients, they did it for themselves.
Right, but the post I was responding to was a general “OMG, they’re gambling with our money!”, not an “OMG, they’re gambling with our money and not giving us a cut.”
A comment which applies just as well to what MF Global specifically did.
But I’d rather not spend any more time in my life parsing the deeper meanings of a ralph124c post
hug
Lord, if just once, I could see one of those Fox bimbos look straight into the camera and report “Big swinging dicks were up today in early trading…”, my faith would know no further boundary.
According to Duffy over at CME, Corzine is a liar. Yes, CME is fighting for their own rep. But this is clearly not a frame-up.
Losing money on investments is different than tapping into funds that aren’t available for such transactions.
Absolutely true.
And this has a much broader application as well. A lot of corporations have all sorts of ethical standards in place that ostensibly should hold the company to the highest standards of behaviour. But as a practical matter, the quickest way to get to the top in the organization is to make piles of money for the company and no one looks at whether you’ve complied with these standards if you’re successful and don’t happen to get tripped up. It’s only if things go sour does the company whip out their standards manual and claim that you’re violated their long-standing policies etc. So as a practical matter, the standards are little better than CYA for the corporation, and the incentive for unethical behaviour is overwhelming.
Understod. That’s what I was referring to.
What I’m saying is that the CEO can’t be expected to sign off on every transaction, at an institution which routinely moves enormous sums of money around. In this light it’s not surprising at all if the CEO would not know what happened to a bunch of money in the prior week.
Well they can’t be expected to sign off on individual transactions made on the lowest level but they are expected to be aware of what is going on around them on a higher level. More to the point, they should have the resources (personal and corporate) to reconstruct what goes on around them in a timely manner. They should be able to call forth all transactions in data form and be able to organize the information for dissemination.