CNBC's John Carney would contrive any flimsy pretext to whitewash Wall Street criminality and to impugn financial reform.
It doesn't matter what the facts are. They're kind of irrelevant so far as John Carney, Senior Editor at CNBC.com, is concerned. He'll invent any wild pretext to impugn financial reform, and to whitewash Wall Street criminality. So when his brother tried smear Democratic reforms, based on no evidence whatsoever, Carney added CNBC's voice to the right wing echo chamber.
The pretext du jour was MF Global, a brokerage firm that imploded because somebody engaged in a massive illegal misappropriation of client funds, and because somebody, almost certainly John Corzine, took wild trading risks in total disregard for standard practices of risk management and corporate governance.
In fact, claims Carney, MF Global was done in by financial reform. His brother, Peter Carney, wrote in the right wing Washington Examiner that, "Corzine -- a former senator and a trusted adviser to the Obama administration -- was aiming to profit off of big-government regulation." Peter Carney's facts to back up this claim? Absolutely none, zero. Just a lot of spurious insinuations. But that's how slime artists operate.
And John Carney amplified his brother's febrile musings with"How Financial Reform Helped Destroy MF Global":
By reducing the role of "smart money," the Volcker Rule may have made pricing more unreliable.
This in turn could explain why MF Global's view of the trades could differ so much from that of its counter-parties.
Naturally, Carney has no evidence that "smart money" made pricing more "unreliable," or why that in any way could excuse Corzine's delusional trading practices. At this point, we know from UBS, from Societe Generale, from SemCrude, and from Amaranth that traders cannot be trusted to rein in their own grandiosity.
Which is precisely why too-big-to-fail institutions need to be subject to the Volker Rule. And precisely why John Carney's efforts at disinformation fall flat.
6:28 AM PT: Of course from news outfit, like Reuters, you'll find: "Insight: MF Global puts harsh light on self-regulation," noting:
["O]ver the past decade, as trading volume soared, federal regulators eased direct oversight of the industry and handed more regulatory powers to the major exchanges. Now, this self-policing arrangement is prompting concerns about the regulators' and the exchanges' ability to detect and deter suspicious conduct in the rapidly expanding marketplace.
"A look at the recent history of self-regulation shows the government repeatedly raised concerns about the resources the major exchanges dedicate to market oversight, while the federal agency also experienced staff cutbacks and retreated from hands-on policing."
http://www.cnbc.com/...