Bankruptcy may be the least of MF Global’s problems: the FBI is one of several federal agencies investigating the bankrupt brokerage firm run by former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine. According to The New York Times, there is no indication yet that any criminal laws were broken. But $600 million in customer money has yet to surface. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the SEC are investigating whether MF Global used customer funds to support its own trades to prop up the company in its final days. MF Global’s lawyers say that there is no shortfall.Read it at The New York TimesNovember 2, 2011 6:24 AM
The Paris office of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was firebombed early Wednesday, one day after the paper named the Prophet Muhammad the “editor-in-chief” of the latest issue and rechristened itself “Sharia Hebdo” to “celebrate” the victory of Tunisia’s Islamist party Ennhada. The attackers threw a single Molotov cocktail into the office. “We no longer have a newspaper,” said the magazine’s editor in chief, who is known as Charb. “All our equipment has been destroyed or has melted.” He said, however, that the staff will do everything it can to put out another issue next week. No one was injured in the attack, and police are looking for two suspects spotted near the scene.
Maybe New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is trying to get the goat of Occupy Wall Street protesters. He said on Tuesday that big banks are not to blame for the financial crisis. “It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis,” Bloomberg said Tuesday. “It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.” He said, “We want to go vilify the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them, and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.”
