Our Potemkin financial system continues to show the cracks in the edifice behind the pretend display of stability with the collapse of brokerage PFGBest.
More than $200 million in customer funds appears to be missing from the accounts of futures broker PFGBest, regulators said on Monday just hours after the firm’s founder attempted suicide outside the company’s Iowa headquarters.
Is it really missing? “Missing” implies that it somehow got lost. It could well be that it was “stolen. PFGBest may have used customer money to cover their own trading losses, just like MF Global did. ($1.6 billion is still missing from MF Global accounts.) In the chaos of a collapsing brokerage, it might be fairly easy for someone to fraudeluently transfer money elsewhere. Perhaps that was part of someone’s plan all along.
Of course our pretend regulators had no clue what was happening and are now ruushing to protect the building after it burned down.