MF: No Mettle?

While John Corzine is scratching his head in Senate hearings trying to make it sound feasible that he can’t explain where all the money has gone, his customers and stockholders battle over who will end up with the candy now that the piñata has been busted.

Here’s a sample of the dirt as reported by Barron’s just days ago…

It’s one thing for $1.2 billion to vanish into thin air through a series of complex trades, the well-publicized phenomenon at bankrupt MF Global. It’s something else for a bar of silver stashed in a vault to instantly shrink in size by more than 25%.

That, in essence, is what’s happening to investors whose bars of silver and gold were held through accounts with MF Global.

The trustee overseeing the liquidation of the failed brokerage has proposed dumping all remaining customer assets—gold, silver, cash, options, futures and commodities—into a single pool that would pay customers only 72% of the value of their holdings. In other words, while traders already may have paid the full price for delivery of specific bars of gold or silver—and hold “warehouse receipts” to prove it—they’ll have to forfeit 28% of the value.

Read more from the source at the link embedded in the quote above.