This, following the $6.3 billion collapse last fall of MF Global, the brokerage Corzine took over after voters ousted him from the Trenton statehouse.
The firm went belly-up after Corzine decided to risk pretty much everything on European debt.
But an audit couldn’t account for $1.2 billion, and suggested the firm may have illegally mixed client funds with the company’s own.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that investigators now believe a “significant amount” of the money could have been “vaporized” by chaotic MF Global trading.
Corzine, for his part, simply scratched his head in public befuddlement last fall when asked where the missing money might be.
That pretty much scotched any further speculation that Corzine would be named President Obama’s next Treasury secretary.
But it hasn’t stopped the former governor from continuing to raise oodles of cash for the Obama-Biden re-election effort — more than $500,000, according to the campaign’s Web site.
That makes him one of the president’s top bundlers — or, as the Obama word-wranglers call them, “volunteer fundraisers” — nationwide.
Granted, Obama may no longer want voters to recall that he once said Corzine was his “go-to guy” for financial advice after he entered the White House.
But apparently he has no problem with taking money from Corzine and his well-heeled friends.
Granted, things have been a little tight for Corzine lately.
He gave up a $12 million severance package when he quit MF Global. (How magnanimous.)
And now he’s reportedly put his Hoboken condo on the market — with an asking price nearly a half-a-million bucks less than he paid for it.
Hey, times are tough — right?
But if Obama and Biden are serious about “an economy that works for everyone, not just a wealthy few” — as the president said in his State of the Union Address — he’ll give back Corzine’s money.
At least until Corzine’s clients find out what happened totheircash.
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