hurricanemaxi
Joined: 04 Nov 2011
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 Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2011 11:09 pm Post subject: Cohan: Tiny Rule Change at Heart of MF Global Failure |
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Laurie R. Ferber has quite a resume. She is currently the general counsel of MF Global Holdings Ltd., the New York-based futures and commodities brokerage that filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 31, listing some $40 billion in liabilities.
Before joining MF Global in 2009, a year or so before Jon Corzine became its chairman and chief executive officer, Ferber was general counsel and chief regulatory officer at the International Derivatives Clearing Group LLC, which clears interest-rate swaps.
Before that, she spent more than 20 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), where first she was general counsel for J. Aron & Co., a commodities business that Goldman Sachs bought in 1981, and then was the co-general counsel of Goldman’s principal business, known as FICC -- for Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities -- when J. Aron was merged into the rest of Goldman’s fixed-income division.
But at the moment, her greatest significance may be as a long-time advocate for revisions to a little-known and vastly underappreciated Commodities Futures Trading Commission rule called Regulation 1.25.
Before 2000, the rule permitted futures brokers to take money from their customers’ accounts and invest it in a number of approved securities limited to “obligations of the United States and obligations fully guaranteed as to principal and interest by the United States (U.S. government securities), and general obligations of any State or of any political subdivision thereof (municipal securities.)” That is, relatively safe securities with high liquidity.
Internal Repo Allowed
The banks, however, pushed the CFTC to expand the investment options that would allow firms to practice “internal repo.” In this scheme, money is taken from customer accounts and invested short-term in a variety of securities, with the futures brokers reaping the not- insignificant financial rewards from their customers’ money.
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