Weekly Feature!: Financial Gobblers!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  I hope all of you are enjoying your turkey/pumpkin and enjoying having conversations with the one’s you love, or trying to avoid them by having the football game on t.v.  Being that this is weekly feature is dedicated to financial heroes, i’d like to take this opportunity to dedicate this article to this holidays mascot: the turkey.  I could fill up an entire blog on people who have had financial “blunders” in the past, but i’d like to pay special attention to on special individual, one who had no disregard for other people’s money and way of living: former Senator of New Jersey, Jon Corzine.  Now who exactly is Jon Corzine, the man who the daily financial put on top of their financial villains list of 2011?  A University of Chicago grad, Corzine worked at Goldman Sachs (in which he was let go) as well as a brief stint as Governor of New Jersey.  However, what put him on the map of my financial turkey list was his position as chief executive of Man Financial (or better known as MF), a commodities brokerage firm.  However, due to risky bets in Europe due to the recession, MF was forced to file for bankruptcy.  This is were this gets interesting.  MF had to claim bankruptcy because, as written by Forbes magazine they simply weren’t making any money.  The way the ran their business was archaic, as they still took orders over the phone when the rest of the world was doing electronic trading.  However, bad business practices aside, the one thing that turned heads all around Wall Street was how, as they were declaring bankruptcy, 1.2 billion dollars of client and employee money disappeared.  Corzine claimed that he had no idea where the money was but everyone speculated that he used that money to pay off any debts that he may have had in order to save himself from hurting his pockets but emptying everyone else's.  Not only did Corzine steal from his employees, but he gambled with money, with little return and caused people their jobs and most importantly he walked away scott-free.  It’s these kind of people, who show no remorse for anyone but themselves that make me have more praise for people like Elizabeth Warren.  Just in case you don’t know who Elizabeth Warren is, check out this article written by a fellow blogger named Steve Thomsen, in which he rewarded her with a “financial heroes” award.  So there you have it, our “financial gobbler” for this special edition of our weekly feature is Jon Corzine, may this award give you great pleasure and keep you away from anymore awards calling you a “financial gobbler”.