Jon Corzine

working with 10,000 small businesses and 10,000 women or working on community teamwork.

I was part of the first group that went out on community teamwork in the company in very early years with John Corzine.

So it really enriched you, including starting things like the LGBT Ally Program.

So there was always something that kept me engaged and fired up.

Uh-huh

... and, in 2008, and how Jon Corzine corzined the world, if you ever follow Zerohedge, and we, we act- li- literally, right, created a, an entire, um, you know, created a word out of whole cloth where Jon Corzine was mixing client money in New York with his accounts, with his London accounts, gold accounts over in Europe, and, you know, pledging it 17 times and going, you know...

And, uh, like-

[laughs]

Right.

And so, okay.

Um, and then, you know, Jon Corzine's re- um, um, reward for a job well done was then to become what? [laughs] Governor of New Jersey, right? Or whatever, whatever.

Mm-hmm.

Another illustration of this came, uh, many years ago when our now colleague, Eric Schatzker, his team invited me to come speak because MF Global had sold bonds.

They were a triple B company with a debut bond that included a change of control prong for the departure of Jon Corzine as, uh, the leader of the company.

Obviously, a highly bespoke provision.

Uh, so they call me in on Friday.

On Monday morning, the news is MF Global is going to be fi- uh, filing bankruptcy.

Uh, the bond never even got a single coupon, and I still wonder whether the inclusion of that type of off-market covenant, uh, for Jon Corzine is actually, was actually an indicator of credit problems.

So, um, covenant's not good or bad, but words on the page, and it's the words that matter.

I think that's a great way to end it.

And my mother was almost 70 when she became a state senator.

She was almost 75 when she ran for lieutenant governor with John Corzine.

And she was almost 80 when she kneecapped, as I like to say, Chris Christie and his presidential aspirations.

And this is a love letter to all of those people who, if you want to take care of your grandchildren, I have no judgment.

Oh, that's so sweet.

And I have the same opinion of Democrats when they do this to guys like John Corzine, who was the governor of New Jersey, was a senator before that.

Not a particularly good politician, but not a particular creep, despite some of the corruption, despite things like getting pulled over speeding.

I think he was doing almost 100 on the Garden State Parkway, got in an accident.

John Whitehead has just stepped down as the co-CEO with John Weinberg when I joined.

And then we had, we had Bob Rubin, and we had Steve Friedman, and we had John Corzine, and we had Hank, and we had Lloyd.

So really all just outstanding, smart leaders, each one a little different.

You know, one of the lessons there being there's a lot of different leadership styles that can be quite effective, and I certainly saw that and, and learned that at, at Goldman Sachs.

Part of it was structural and inherited.

Part of it was that his predecessor, John Corzine, had contributed exactly zero dollars to the pension in some years.

Zero.

The actuarially required contribution, just not paid.

which has been proposed, never passed, and would create its own moral hazard problem, or growth, real economic growth in the states with the worst problems that expands the tax base faster than pension costs grow.

Any of those could help.

None of them is assured, and the political will required to pursue any of them involves elected officials asking their current constituents to pay the costs of their predecessors' decisions.

which is in fact what fiscal responsibility means, and also one of the harder political asks in a democratic system, what I notice is that the framing of this problem in most political debate is still almost entirely about blame.