How The Hunt Brothers Cornered The Silver Market

The fact that so many of these very wealthy and very smart people keep getting snake bit in the paper / futures markets really should tell people something. Thanks to the debacle at MF Global, I am wondering whether or not the futures markets will survive. It will be difficult if it becomes a routine matter to steal, er, "lose" cash money from customer's individual allocated accounts. It has me wondering just how different this is from a person's individual allocated bank account. Sticky fingers are loose, folks, and if they know the right people, they will NOT be prosecuted.

They should have bought physical silver and not just futures. Plus one huge safe

What I am reading these days suggests that MFG used a number of "loop holes" in their business... such as putting allocated customer money into non-allocated accounts at one of their subsidiaries that did not have to report to FINRA. Another web site suggested that the money that was "lost" by MFG all came from accounts that had filed the paperwork for physical delivery and that this exact same amount somehow turned up as silver bullion added to JPM's hoard. The implication is that COMEX was unable to fulfill those requests for physical metal, so rather than allowing the COMEX to implode, action was taken to ensure that those requests were never made. Money was "lost"... the dog ate my homework, etc. Not that it is likely that we will ever know the WHOLE story here but a great deal of skulduggery seems far more likely than the "oops, we made a boo-boo" defense we are hearing now. MFG was a company with tens of thousands of customers and about a 175 year history of handling commodity trades competently. Somehow, all that managed to disappear during the 19 months that Mr. Corzine was in charge of the company. It will be VERY interesting to hear some testimony from the people who were actually making all these trades and movements of customer money... and who approved them.