MF Global agreed to pay a $100 million penalty and pay all of the money still owed to customers, as part of the settlement deal with regulators.

The CFTC found that former Assistant Treasurer Edith O'Brien was responsible for improperly transferring some of the missing customer funds to other accounts in the final days before MF Global went under, to help pay off some of the firm's other debts. O'Brien was charged with "aiding and abetting" the misuse of the funds.

Reuters reports:

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Bigger isn’t always better. From the Tower of Babel to Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting, that principle’s been enshrined in law and legend since the dawn of history. Have we forgotten the lesson?

Corporations, databases, storehouses of personal and institutional wealth all are expanding at ever-increasing speed, threatening to engulf our economy and our lives as they do. That’s the problem with Big Things: Once they reached a certain size, they keep on getting bigger.

Here are seven ways the runaway power of Bigger in finance and in data is threatening to overwhelm us all.

1. Bigger Corporations

Americans have known about the danger of overly large corporations since the founding of the Republic. “I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations,” said Thomas Jefferson, “which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

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If Kanye West's latter career and the trailer for the forthcoming film "The Wolf of Wall Street" have anything in common, it's an uncanny sense that America is more or less over the class resentment generated by the 2008 Wall Street crash. In 2011, Americans occupied Wall Street; in 2013, they're buying "Yeezus," the album of a rapper who's gone from bragging he was a millionaire (on "Watch the Throne") to calling himself a god. And they're preparing to see the second film in six months in which DiCaprio plays a charming, roguish financial swindler with a taste for excess.

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It is going on five years since the financial crash and three years since President Obama signed the meager Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and the big banks are still scamming and conning and ripping off their customers. What a huge surprise.

After the financial crash, we heard about a laundry list of abuses and frauds that ranged from small things, like hidden fees, to pushing minorities into subprime loans and then switching them into more expensive mortgages at signing time, to huge things like selling trillions of dollars in complicated CDO schemes and making bets on derivatives of derivatives without having the reserves to pay off what they owed when the bets went bad.

Of course, no one at the top was prosecuted and the banks were allowed to settle a host of charges (which meant that their shareholders, not the executives who made the decisions, paid the fines). The bad behavior gave these giants a competitive advantage, driving out what good companies there were. So the costly and destructive bad behavior, schemes, cons and scams continue.

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America is the richest country on Earth. We have the most millionaires, the most billionaires and our wealthiest citizens have garnered more of the planet's riches than any other group in the world. We even have hedge fund managers who make in one hour as much as the average family makes in 21 years!

This opulence is supposed to trickle down to the rest of us, improving the lives of everyday Americans. At least that's what free-market cheerleaders repeatedly promise us.

Unfortunately, it's a lie, one of the biggest ever perpetrated on the American people.

Our middle class is falling further and further behind in comparison to the rest of the world. We keep hearing that America is number one. Well, when it comes to middle-class wealth, we're number 27.

The most telling comparative measurement is median wealth (per adult). It describes the amount of wealth accumulated by the person precisely in the middle of the wealth distribution—50 percent of the adult population has more wealth, while 50 percent has less. You can't get more middle than that.

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“Bank of America’s practice is to string homeowners along with no apparent intention of providing the permanent loan modifications it promises,” said Erika Brown, one of the former employees. The damning evidence would spur a series of criminal investigations of BofA executives, if we still had a rule of law in this country for Wall Street banks.

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One goes by the name of the “intelligence community” and its epicenter is the National Security Agency within the Defense Department. If we trusted that it reasonably balanced its snooping on Americans with our nation’s security needs, and that our elected representatives effectively oversaw that balance, there would be little cause for concern. We would not worry that the information so gathered might be misused to harass individuals, thereby chilling free speech or democratic debate, or that some future government might use it to intimidate critics and opponents. We would feel confident, in other words, that despite the scale and secrecy of the operation, our privacy, civil liberties, and democracy were nonetheless adequately protected.

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Economic determinists — fatalists, really — assume that globalization and technological change must now condemn a large portion of the American workforce to under-unemployment and stagnant wages, while rewarding those with the best eductions and connections with ever higher wages and wealth. And therefore that the only way to get good jobs back and avoid widening inequality is to withdraw from the global economy and become neo-Luddites, destroying the new labor-saving technologies.

That’s dead wrong. Economic isolationism and neo-Ludditism would reduce everyone’s living standards. Most importantly, there are many ways to create good jobs and reduce inequality.

Other nations are doing it. Germany was generating higher real median wages until recently, before it was dragged down by austerity it imposed the European Union. Singapore and South Korea continue to do so. Chinese workers have been on a rapidly-rising tide of higher real wages for several decades. These nations are implementing national economic strategies to build good jobs and widespread prosperity. The United States is not.

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Before getting to the big news, let's review the dominant fairy tale: As embodied by New York City's major education announcement this weekend, the "reform" fantasy pretends that a lack of teacher "accountability" is the major education problem and somehow wholly writes family economics out of the story (amazingly, this fantasy persists even in a place like the Big Apple where economic inequality is particularly crushing). That key -- and deliberate -- omission serves myriad political interests.

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Please.

I can understand the jubilation in the narrow sense that we’ve been down so long everything looks up. Plus, professional economists tend to cheerlead because they believe that if consumers and businesses think the future will be great, they’ll buy and invest more – leading to a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But prophesies can’t be self-fulfilling if they’re based on wishful thinking.

The reality is we’re still in the doldrums, and the most recent data gives cause for serious worry.

Almost all the forward movement in the economy is now coming from consumers —  whose spending is 70 percent of economic activity. But wages are still going nowhere, which means consumer spending will slow because consumers just don’t have the money to spend.

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The advice starts off innocuous enough (though dripping with macho bravado and condescension):

Buy a decent suit or 3, but no cuffed or pleated pants.  And don’t wear a tie unless you might have a meeting.  No one likes that kind of kiss-ass.

Don’t be too good to do the coffee runs.  It shows confidence.  Just don’t fuck it up.  If you can’t be trusted with coffee, how can you sell bonds or manage risk.

This might be the most important one. It’s okay to make a mistake or ask a question. But don’t ever ask the same question or make the same mistake twice. If you do, just know that the world needs ditchdiggers too.

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Natural gas supplies nationally were plentiful, gas production was unusually high, and by midsummer storage facilities were brimming with the stuff. Prices were low, hovering between $6 and $8 per MMBtu. Since investors didn’t expect any reason for prices to shoot up, nobody was very interested in options that gave them the right to buy natural gas well above that. The options were going for bargain-basement prices. So Hunter swooped in, scooping up millions of dollars of options on the cheap.

Energy was a growing colossus in Amaranth, and by August 2005 energy investments were tying up 36 percent of Amaranth’s money. Hunter was taking a huge gamble when he bought up his millions of dollars of options. He would profit only if natural gas prices rose dramatically. And that didn’t seem likely to happen.

Then Mother Nature came roaring in to Hunter’s rescue.

On the evening of August 25, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck. It hit the Florida coast between Miami and Fort Lauderdale first. Torrential rain, twelve inches or more, pelted the coast, and winds roared to 80 miles an hour. About a dozen people died, more than a million people lost power, and flooding was extensive.

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All of this is to say, I empathize with the urge to duck a fight. They’re ugly things, fights. But despite what you’ve heard, there’s the personal and then there’s the political, and they’re not always one in the same. A conflict-averse person is OK; a conflict-averse politics is not.

Take Obamacare, for example. With its full implementation inching ever closer to the here and now, there’s a rising chorus of anxiety on the Left, and glee on the right, over what’s looking like a rocky transition. Time will tell, of course, but if these fears prove justified, the Democrats’ recurrent fear of conflict will be in large part to blame.

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The Dow Jones industrial average climbed as much as 218 points during morning trading as traders returned from the Memorial Day holiday. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note climbed its highest level in more than a year as investors moved money out of safe assets and into riskier ones like stocks.

The jump in home prices reinforced a theme that has been a major factor behind the 17 percent surge this year in the Standard & Poor's 500 index: a strong recovery in the housing market.

"They say the stock market tends to lead the economy. Now we're starting to see the improvement on the economic front, so there's some justification for this rally," said Ryan Detrick, a senior technical strategist at Schaeffer's investment research.

The market is coming off a rare loss last week. Traders worried that the Federal Reserve might slow its extraordinary economic stimulus measures, which have been another factor behind the stock market's advance this year. The Dow and the S&P 500 had their first losing weeks in a month.

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According to the New York Times, a bill that’s already moved through the House Financial Services Committee, allowing more of the very kind of derivatives trading (bets on bets) that got the Street into trouble, was drafted by Citigroup — whose recommended language was copied nearly word for word in 70 lines of the 85-line bill.

Where were House Democrats? Right behind it. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, Democrat of New York, a major recipient of the Street’s political largesse, co-sponsored it. Most of the Democrats on the Committee, also receiving generous donations from the big banks, voted for it. Rep. Jim Himes, another proponent of the bill and a former banker at Goldman Sachs, now leads the Democrat’s fund-raising effort in the House.

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Cathy Harding: At the upcoming Rediscovering Government conference titled “A Bold Approach to the Jobs Emergency,” you’re going to make the case that solving the jobs emergency requires a comprehensive approach. Is that a new perspective on job creation? In other words, what needs to be included as part of a meaningful response that has not be included before?

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The document, given to top young brokers at the financial firm, is a script on how to pitch stocks to prospective clients; it deviates considerably from the company's stock script, which is far more bland and less legally dubious. “It’s secret, privileged information,” a former employee told BuzzFeed. “Some people at the firm don’t even know about it.”

The pitches range from the overtly sexist to the plainly misleading, but each relies on bizarre mind games and high school-style bullying to "close" with a client. Basically, it confirms everything everyone already thought about Wall Street guys being misogynists and compulsive liars. Surprise!

Excerpts from the guide, obtained by Mariah Summers at BuzzFeed:

"Don't pitch the bitch"

According to the source, if a prospective client tells a broker that he (the ideal JTF client is always a man, naturally) wants to speak to his wife before committing to a stock, the broker is instructed to make the prospect feel like a total wimp for it:

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In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, current Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Jo White and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Warren challenges decisions to settle with banks, offering a slap on the wrist, as opposed to jail sentences.  whether they had done any cost-benefit research into prosecuting a bank versus settling with one, which is equivalent to a slap on the wrist for a profitable financial institution.

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Bloomberg has responded that the messages were willingly made available to them by clients, but their availability online to the broader public certainly "threatens to unnerve clients," as the FT noted.

The FT reported:

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The ability to snoop on Bloomberg terminal users came to light recently when Goldman officials learned that at least one reporter at the news service had access to a wide array of information about customer usage, sources said.

In one instance, a Bloomberg reporter asked a Goldman executive if a partner at the bank had recently left the firm — noting casually that he hadn’t logged into his Bloomberg terminal in some time, sources added.

Goldman later learned that Bloomberg staffers could determine not only which of its employees had logged into Bloomberg’s proprietary terminals but how many times they had used particular functions, insiders said.

... “In light of [Goldman’s] concern as well as a general heightened sensitivity to data access, we decided to disable journalist access to this customer relationship information for all clients,” he noted.

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