Collapse of MF Global - the lessons

Read Lucky Tan's article here.

The collapse of MF Global in the USA have a direct impact on retail investors in Singapore. They have money in their accounts with this brokerage firm and are worried that they may not be able to get their money back.

This brokerage firm lost a lot of money in the European bonds. It was reported that they might have transferred some of their client money to cover these loses.  It could be a big mess.

600 million missing in MF Global

This raises the issue about financial institutions, such as banks and brokerage firms, being involved in large scale speculation with their shareholder's money and, through illegally means, with their client's money. How can it be prevented?

I recall reading about the Glass Stegall Act in the USA which used to separate investment banking (where the speculation is carried out) from commercial banking (which has the fiduciary duty of looking after the money of their clients. This Act was passed during the Great Depression - after the lesson of the global financial collapse in 1928 - to address the same problem. With the passage of time, the lessons were forgotten and the key provisions of the Glass Steagall Act was repealled. This allowed the replay of the same drama.

Here is a description of the Act from Wikipedia:

The Banking Act of 1933, Pub.L. 73-66, 48 Stat. 162, enacted June 16, 1933, was a law that established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in the United States and introduced banking reforms, some of which were designed to control speculation.[1] It is most commonly known as the Glass–Steagall Act, after its legislative sponsors, Senator Carter Glass (D–Va.) and Congressman Henry B. Steagall (D–Ala.-3). Some provisions of the Act, such as Regulation Q, which allowed the Federal Reserve to regulate interest rates in savings accounts, were repealed by the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. Provisions that prohibit a bank holding company from owning other financial companies were repealed on November 12, 1999, by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, named after its co-sponsors Phil Gramm (R, Texas), Rep. Jim Leach (R, Iowa), and Rep. Thomas J. Bliley, Jr. (R, Virginia).[2][3]
The repeal of provisions of the Glass–Steagall Act by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act in 1999 effectively removed the separation that previously existed between investment banking which issued securities and commercial banks which accepted deposits. The deregulation also removed conflict of interest prohibitions between investment bankers serving as officers of commercial banks.

What are the lessons for today? Financial services and banking have to be more strongly regulated. Some specific measures include the following:

• To separate investment banking from commercial banking

• To require all trust account to be held by the banks, and not the brokerage firms. However, the law has to be updated to make it convenient to operate these trust accounts conveniently and through electronic means - and still retain the value of a third party oversight.

If these measures are not addressed, we will continue to see a repeat of other failures, similar to MF Global.