The spectacular fall of Jon Corzine will be on display Thursday when the former New Jersey senator and governor testifies before a House panel on the bankruptcy of his former firm, MF Global.
Just months ago Corzine, a Democrat, was seen as a possible successor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
So confident was MF Global in Corzine that its bond sale in August included a “key man” provision that gave investors an extra 1 percent in interest if Corzine left the firm “due to his appointment to a federal position by the president of the United States and confirmation of that appointment by the United States Senate prior to July 1, 2013.”
Aside from being a resident of NJ and having had Jon Corzine as governor for four years (and having meet him twice at an annual kids’ event at the governor mansion — which he did not actually live in since it’s an old colonial house and he lived in a multi-million dollar penthouse in Jersey City and flew to work in his own helicopter every day) I know two things about Corzine that would make me seriously hesitate to invest a dime with him:
1. Before the election his ex-wife put out a press statement that he was basically an utterly dishonorable weasel who cheated on her and threw his family under the bus to be with his mistress. Her question was “why would you ever trust anybody who would do a thing like that?” Of course it was poo-pooed at the time as an attempt by a bitter ex-spouse to throw a monkey wrench into the career aspirations of her former husband.
2. The guy almost died when he was in a huge accident in which he was in the front passenger seat (the “death seat”) of a government car driven by a police officer going 80 mph down the Garden State Parkway without his seatbelt on. This was because he was running late for a (not all that important) appointment.
OK — I have driven close to 80 on the GSP myself, but who orders a cop to break the law (and gets away with it) and above all who in God’s name would drive those speeds without a seatbelt on? You’d have to have no sense of risk or risk management whatsoever. For that alone I wouldn’t invest $1 with him. (Turns out that what he was doing at MFG was pretty much the financial equivalent of driving 80 mph without a seatbelt.)