Tell It To Al

Captain Renault from the film Casa Blanca: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

Former MF Global Chairman Jon Corzine: “There were many transactions that occurred in those last chaotic days …. It would be very hard for me to speculate … I never intended to break any rules …”

All anyone wants to know is what happened to $1.2 billion in customer accounts that seem to have vanished from MF Global as the $41 billion firm imploded under the weight of its bad bets in Europe, and other problems.

Corzine, a former New Jersey Governor, U.S. Senator, and Goldman Sachs chairman, couldn’t or wouldn’t say went he before Congress last week. He put up all the classic denials you see in movies and TV shows. It was difficult deciding which fictional character to compare him to, so I went with Sargent Schutltz from  Hogan’s Heroe’s:  “I know nothing! Nothing!”

Open to suggestions, though. Who would you compare him to?

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

Maybe going on all those reality TV shows wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Judge James Zagel made it clear in handing down at 14-year sentence to former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevhich that the government wasn’t too happy about it.

I wish he hadn’t said as much.

I think it would be great to see every white collar defendant do a show.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

Click here to read my column on Blago’s first trial in 2009, which he largely won.

And click here to read my column on Judge Zagel’s crime novel, “Money to Burn.

If the world’s biggest banks are committing fraud, why not get a job at one of them and commit your own fraud?

So goes the ethic of the rogue trader.

John Gapper, a columnist for the Financial Times, has been writing about rogue traders for years. He’s out with a new ebook called “How To Be a Rogue Trader,” from Portfolio/Penguin.

It’s indeed odd when a major world bank is suddenly short a couple of billion dollars, and the person responsible is a young man on the trading floor who somehow managed to hide these losses for years. It says something about the financial controls at these banks. It also says something about these banks, creating an environment where this type of calamity has happened repeatedly.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

Why is that the stock market soars every time the Federal Reserve Bank finds a clever new way to inject more free money into the banking system?

The Fed would not be doing this if a) it’s last plan worked and b) it wasn’t scared of the prospect of a global economic collapse. It is simply not good news when the Fed does something it has never done before, like last week when it rallied central banks around the world to provide cheaper dollars to European banks. Markets, however, rally, because there’s more free Fed money up for grabs.

None dare call it socialism. But if the Fed were providing interest-free loans to welfare moms instead of bankers, you can bet they would.

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journalism.

Traveling tonight, I marvel at getting through the TSA lines with no nudie X-ray photo, no intimate body massage from a uniformed government thug, and no real  hassle.

I have a bit of a wait ahead of me, so to celebrate my relatively easy night, I order a steak at The Denver Chop House inside Terminal A a the Denver International Airport.

This was a big mistake. All they would give me to cut it was a plastic knife.

Have you ever tried to eat a New York Strip with a plastic knife? I tell you, the terrorists  have won. I would like he TSA to refund the $32 I spent on this steak.

“It cuts better than you would think,” the waitress tells me when I thoughtlessly ask for a real knife, forgetting that I was in a concentration camp for innocent, American travelers.

Yes, and so did a few simple box cutters on 9/11, I remark.

The waitress also noted that while the knife was plastic, the fork was the real thing. If a terrorist can take down a plane with a bottle of water, just think what he could do with a real, metal fork.  (Note to TSA:  Several times while you groped my wife after she refused your unnecessary doses of radiation, your screeners completely overlooked bottles of water in her bags. You are not even good at the meaningless work you’ve been assigned.)

Oh, and the knife I got from the Chop House, while plastic,  was chrome. It sure looked like the real thing. And if you can rob a bank with a fake gun …

Just another reason why the TSA will ultimately be abolished. It’s just wasting government money.

 Chiquita Brands International shook down Charlotte, N.C., for $22 million.

The company needs to leave Cincinatti after nearly a quarter of a century because the city’s airport has suffered a decline in air service. So it put itself up for  bid, and Charlotte put up the most money. This is standard operating procedure in the world of local economic development, but it’s also another form of corporate welfare.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.