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Why Jon Corzine Got What He Deserved

He expected to jump ship with a massive severance package.

If you haven’t followed the Jon Corzine saga, the New York Times’s Joe Nocera provides a helpful overview. The takeaway: the former New Jersey Governor and Wall Street titan got exactly what was coming to him. You see, in Corzine’s perfect world, he would have been able to sell his sinking MF Global Holdings and take home $12 million in severance pay—after “single-handedly destroying” it with brazenly risky bets and obscene compensation levels. In at least a small example of justice on Wall Street, MF Global Holdings went bankrupt, and Corzine got nothing. But feel free to be outraged anyway. “It seems almost criminal that Corzine was still entitled so a $12.1 million payment after destroying so much value,” Nocera writes. “Yet that would have been the result. And you wonder why people are angry?”