Welcome to Capital Account. More than $200 million in customer money is allegedly missing from the accounts of one of the largest, non-clearing, US futures commission merchants, PFG Best. That's according to regulators. The money was supposed to be in segregated customer accounts. Customers have been told their money is frozen. Does this sound oddly familiar? We will hear from two PFG Best customers, Christopher Olson and Mohamed Hawary. And there is evidence PFG Best may have been committing fraud with falsified statements for years, according to regulators. The FBI is investigating, the CFTC is alleging fraud, but why did regulators miss this? We'll talk about what this shortfall means for investor confidence when a regulated broker can get away with this undetected for years. And this is not the first time sacrosanct segregated customer funds have gone missing. MF Global went bankrupt less than a year ago taking $1.6 billion in customer money with it. We talk to a man f
We have been saying it for weeks, and today even the WSJ jumped on the bandwagon: the sole reason why crude prices are surging (RIP European profit margins: with EUR Brent at a record, we can only assume the ECB will pull a 2011 and hike rates in 3-4 months even as it pumps trillions in PIIGS, banks bailout liquidity) is because global liquidity has risen by $2 trillion in a few short months, on the most epic shadow liquidity tsunami launched in history in lieu of QE3 (discussed extensively here in our words, but here are JPM 's). Luckily, the market is finally waking up to this, and just as world central banks were preparing to offset deflation, they will instead have to deal with spiking inflation, because the market may have a short memory, it can remember what happened just about this time in 2011. And the problem is that when it comes to the inflation trade, the market, unlike in most other instances, can be fast - blazing fast, at anticipating what the central pl
If readers have the sense there has been a deluge of Kyle Bass reading (and viewing) materials on Zero Hedge in the past two weeks, it is because there has been: and why not - after all, unlike all other cheap talking heads, and know-nothing pundits who merely need a suit to make an appearance on one of the TV's financial comedy channels, Kyle has been consistent in the most important thing - telling the truth. Today, he took his resurgent popularity to CNBC which always knows which way the winds blow, and told David Faber more or less everything that Zero Hedge readers know already about Europe's collapse, on why the ECB will print but only after a default, and about the inevitable global debt restructuring. There was a twist: as most regulars here know, the key topic of the past week, of December, and potentially of 2011, is the limitless "fractional Prime Broker lending" of assets-cum-liabilities (and when it comes to the realization that one's gold itself m
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