Jon Corzine was lousy as governor of New Jersey and now it turns out he’s lousy as a Wall Street executive.
Corzine’s MF Global (which a friend attuned to the financial markets calls MotherF***** Global because of all of its bad investments) filed for bankruptcy this week following massive losses tied to its investments in foreign debt and its failure to close the deal of being bought by a rival brokerage firm.
The deal went belly up when federal regulators discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars in customer money has gone missing from MF Global in recent days.
As a bond trader and then CEO of Goldman Sachs, Corzine made a large fortune, but as one business writer notes, that was an era “when it didn’t take much more than a balance sheet and a phone to make money.”
Corzine nearly ran Goldman Sachs into the ground in the late 1990s before further running New Jersey into the ground because his gut instinct as a liberal Democrat was so out of tune with the tough love that the Garden State needed and current Governor Chris Christie, to a great extent, has applied.
Photograph by Rich Schultz/The Associated Press