Something Is Very Wrong with Financial Regulation in the United States...

Surely to set up risk controls poor enough that you can steal $1 billion of your customers' money and bet it on the dogtrack is to commit a crime , isn't it? I mean, you are holding yourself out to the public as a financial institution rather than a Three-Card Monte team. And that is criminal fraud.

Duncan Black:

Eschaton: Oopsy: A firm granted primary dealer status from the Fed just got all confused and accidentally misplaced your billion dollars.

A criminal investigation into the collapse of the brokerage firm MF Global and the disappearance of about $1 billion in customer money is now heading into its final stage without charges expected against any top executives.

After 10 months of stitching together evidence on the firm’s demise, criminal investigators are concluding that chaos and porous risk controls at the firm, rather than fraud, allowed the money to disappear, according to people involved in the case.

Bygones.

Doubt the "chaos and porous risk controls" excuse will fly when I try to pull a tenner out of the local 7-11 till.