"The Reuters piece misses the point.

Both the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange were charged with overseeing MF Global, their clearing member. If we are to believe them, they had no idea of any difficulties within the firm before customer accounts went missing just a few days before the collapse. But someone clearly knew of the cratering positions and imminent collapse of MF Global, as billions of dollars of accounts were "coincidentally" withdrawn. And what do the Koch brothers say was the reason for these withdrawals? There's been no comment."

In a nutshell, the MF Global scandal can be summed up as follows. MF Global was contractually and legally obligated to segregate their client accounts, and regulatory authorities are charged with ensuring MF Global's compliance with the same. Both failed miserably, and the little guys/clients who believed their money was safe, suffered the consequences. This is the essence of the scandal and precious little is being done by the authorities to assure the "commoners" this process will not be repeated. Confidence in the soundness of the financial system has been compromised yet again. Canadian retirement accounts are lawfully required to be held in segregated status too. Given ample evidence of Authorities' failure and inability or unwillingness to enforce "the rules" in general, I have a lot less faith in Government's ability to ensure the safety of my own retirement funds in the event of a wide-scale financial crisis. Sinclair's advice to segregate your savings out of the reach of the broken financial system makes more sense with each passing day.