Corzine Crashes Like It’s 2008

Former head of Goldman Sachs, former US Senator from NJ, former NJ Governor and now former wannabe investment banking tycoon, Jon “I don’t need no freakin’ seatbelt” Corzine meets a fitting end to his career – both as a CEO and politician – after flying his company, MF Global, into a mountainside. He ran his company the same way he ran the state of NJ; fast and loose with other people’s money, and once again, he leaves a mess for others to clean up. 

After leaving as head of Goldman Sachs, Jon Corzine was elected U.S. Senator in 2000 and soon thereafter installed on the Banking Committee, notwithstanding the fact that he still owned Goldman stock worth more than 300 million. He insisted, of course, that he had no conflict of interest as Congress and Wall Street conspired together to monetize shady mortgages and unload them onto the tax payers (and thereby increase the value of Goldman’s stock, of course).

For an encore, Corzine is elected Governor of NJ and immediately begins the process of running the state into the ground. He got in bed with the public sector unions while negotiating with them (literally, in the case of Carla Katz, union president), cut programs, raised our taxes to the highest level in the nation and still managed to rack up a huge deficit. To add insult to injury, he raided the pension, transportation and unemployment funds. He left NJ with higher tuition costs, higher property taxes, an 8 billion deficit, more than 100 billion in unfunded long term liabilities, some of the worst roads in the country, and no rainy-day funds at the onset of the worst recession since the Great Depression. It’s hard to imagine he could have screwed things up more than McGreevy.

In the grand finale of his destructive career, Corzine flew MF Global into a mountainside by buying up the debt of bankrupt Euro countries Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, and Ireland. MF Global admits that it raided client’s accounts in an effort to cover margin calls on its souring bets. That’s a big, big, no, no (and somebody could go to jail)!  The company’s books are a shambles and regulators aren’t clear where all the money went, exactly, which is reminiscent of how Corzine ran the state of NJ.

Such is a fitting end to the career of a public blood sucker. Nice implosion, Jon, and good riddance to you.

One lesson here: Integrity matters and so do conflicts of interest.