Opinion

Paying for Jon Corzine

Too bad New Jersey taxpayers weren’t customers of MF Global, the Wall Street trading firm that went belly up after 19 months under Jon Corzine’s leadership.

Despite initial fears that MF Global had lost $1 billion of their money, the firm’s customers have recovered about 89 percent of their investments and are expected eventually to get all of it back.

Garden Staters, on the other hand, are still paying for Jon Corzine’s fiscal miscues.

These thoughts come as federal regulators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a landmark civil suit against Corzine and MF Global’s former assistant treasurer. The CFTC says previously undisclosed e-mails and recorded phone calls show that Corzine played a much more involved role in trying to stave off bankruptcy than he’s admitted in testimony before Congress. And we’d sure like to hear Corzine explain the discrepancy.

But the CFTC is not exactly a disinterested party. Yes, Corzine violated the rules when MF Global failed to keep customer funds segregated. But where was the CFTC? When the crunch came, these regulators failed in their job just as Corzine did.

Still, there’s a bright side. Only a few months before the MF Global meltdown, Corzine was being touted as a replacement for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. And why not? Vice President Joe Biden had earlier declared him the go-to guy on financial advice for the Obama administration.

The point is that markets have a way of limiting and correcting damage. Not so for politics. If Corzine had managed to get that Treasury job, we’d all be paying.