Corzine Steak Dinner Speech Gave No Hint of MF Global’s ‘Doom’
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The night before MF Global Holdings Ltd. posted its biggest quarterly loss, triggering a 48 percent stock plunge, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jon Corzine appeared at a steak dinner at New York’s Helmsley Park Lane Hotel for a speech to a group of bankers and traders.
“There was no sense at all that there was impending doom,” Kenneth Polcari, a managing director of ICAP Corporates, said of Corzine’s Oct. 24 address to the National Organization of Investment Professionals. “He gave a spectacular speech” about his decades at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., life as a U.S. senator and New Jersey governor and his return to the private sector. “He’s had a full life, up until now.”