Where's the Money, Jon?

摘要

On other mornings, the leather upholstered chair at Esquires barbershop could have been a throne, from which Jon Corzine would rise to stride supreme up the street where he had made his name and his fortune. But on this gray, drizzly dawn just before Thanksgiving, the once mighty 64-year-old emerged from the shop at 14 Wall Street looking sunken and defeated. He moved up the block with a skittish quickness, his blue blazer hanging almost scarecrow-loose on his shoulders, as he nervously raised and lowered a coffee cup to his face, seemingly not so much to take sips as to conceal his face-lest somebody recognize him and maybe ask the big question: "Where's the money?" The money being up to $1.2 billion in customer funds that had vanished after the implosion of the investment firm he ran, MF Global. The immediate cause of the eighth-largest bankruptcy in American history was a $6.3 billion bet on European debt that Corzine had declared was a sure thing. He seems to have been blinded less by greed than by need, a need to elevate little-known MF Global into the league of Goldman Sachs, where this son of an Illinois tenant farmer had risen to become CEO, only to be deposed more than a decade ago.