OPINION: Bonfires of the boneheads

On Monday, Oct. 31, MF Global Holdings Ltd., a Wall Street investment bank and the nation’s third largest futures trading clearinghouse, disintegrated into the vapors of bankruptcy. The demise was not unexpected; the Wall Street Journal had chronicled MFG’s dying wheezes for a week. And, yet, when MFG finally took the Big Flop, $600 million or so in customer trading account cash was missing. Some of the loot, reported Marcia Taylor of DTN, came from “cattle feeders and grain elevators whose MF Global accounts are missing large chunks of their futures accounts…” The big news here isn’t that another boneheaded master of the universe took another Wall Street investment bank over a cliff. No, the big news is that no regulator — not the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, not the Securities Exchange Commission, not the Justice Department — stepped in to keep MFG from taking customer money with it. Earlier in the week, USDA acknowledged its role in stacking the deck to favor Big Ag’s new poodle, U.S Farmers & Rancher’s Alliance, the St. Louis-based effort to make today’s genetically modified, verticalized agriculture look more like yesterday’s warm and fuzzy farms and ranches. According to figures supplied by the department’s Ag Marketing Service, $6.26 million in national checkoff collections went to USFRA in “fiscal year 2011” for such urgent items as “capturing and distributing informational interviews with USFRA board members” and to “develop four HTML emails for affiliates and strategic partners…”...more