What Really Happened to the MF Global Money

Re-hypothecation on steroids.

(Business Law Currents) A legal loophole in international brokerage regulations means that few, if any, clients of MF Global are likely to get their money back. Although details of the drama are still unfolding, it appears that MF Global and some of its Wall Street counterparts have been actively and aggressively circumventing U.S. securities rules at the expense (quite literally) of their clients.
MF Global's bankruptcy revelations concerning missing client money suggest that funds were not inadvertently misplaced or gobbled up in MF’s dying hours, but were instead appropriated as part of a mass Wall St manipulation of brokerage rules that allowed for the wholesale acquisition and sale of client funds through re-hypothecation. A loophole appears to have allowed MF Global, and many others, to use its own clients’ funds to finance an enormous $6.2 billion Eurozone repo bet.
If anyone thought that you couldn’t have your cake and eat it too in the world of finance, MF Global shows how you can have your cake, eat it, eat someone else’s cake and then let your clients pick up the bill. Hard cheese for many as their dough goes missing.

Read the whole thing.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then Apple should be thoroughly flattered:

Entire Apple stores being faked in China

China reaches a new milestone in fake goods: entire Apple stores, signs, sales assts and all

BEIJING (AP) -- At first, it looks like a sleek Apple store. Sales assistants in blue T-shirts with the company's logo chat to customers. Signs advertising the iPad 2 hang from the white walls. Outside, the famous logo sits next to the words "Apple Store."
And that's the clue it's fake.
China, long known for producing counterfeit consumer gadgets, software and brand name clothing, has reached a new piracy milestone -- fake Apple stores.

I know China "owns" us; we hear about it everyday. But until I start reading stories about how we're faking successful Chinese branded stores here in the US, I'm not going to worry about it too much.

This is an indication that the Chinese are beginning to have too much money. It is my belief that only people with too much money buy Apple products in the first place.

Dictator's Dividend

Max Boot nails it in the LA Times today:

Of the top 14 oil exporters, only one is a well-established liberal democracy — Norway. Two others have recently made a transition to democracy — Mexico and Nigeria. Iraq is trying to follow in their footsteps. That's it. Every other major oil exporter is a dictatorship — and the run-up in oil prices has been a tremendous boon to them.
My associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, Ian Cornwall, calculates that if oil averages $71 a barrel this year, 10 autocracies stand to make about $500 billion more than in 2003, when oil was at $27. This windfall helps to squelch liberal forces and entrench noxious dictators in such oil producers

The Legacy of Robert Mugabe

Spin is an inherent part of storytelling. Everybody has a perspective, and the way they choose to spin a story reveals a lot about the storyteller.
Robert Mugabe has personally done more to destroy Zimbabwe than any of the numerous factors he blames for taking one of Africa's most productive exporting nations and placing it firmly on the road to just another hopeless African basket case in the space of approximately 5 years. At the heart of the problem lies his land redistribution program in which white owned farms were to be purchased at market prices and turned over to the black majority in a bid to equalize things following years of civil war and minority white rule. He went about this in a methodical way for a short time, but it didn't take long for him to resort to outright seizure of Zimbabwe's most fertile land in order to turn it over to political cronies with little interest in maintaining the