A fallen star

Jon Corzine has gone from a possible candidate for US Treasury Secretary to the man who presided over the fall of MF Global and the eighth-largest bankruptcy in American history, writes Michael Daly

Jon Corzine took over as chief executive of MF Global in 2010. While he was building up his firm’s reputation at home, his core strategy focused on Europe and on buying burgeoning government debt in Italy, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, and Ireland. He used repurchasing agreements to acquire loans to buy the bonds while using the bonds as collateral, incurring huge debt to buy huge debt. Picture: Getty

He gave a lecture in September 2010 on the importance of learning lessons from the financial disaster of 2008. “We need to address the accumulation of debt at every level of our society,” Corzine declared