Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money.

From full global headquarters, this is Motley Full Money.

Welcome to Motley Full Money. Thanks for being here. I'm your host, Chris Hill.

And we've got a special edition of Motley Full Money this week.

We're going to have an encore presentation of one of my favorite interviews

of the year. That's former mobster turned bestselling author, Louis Ferante.

That's a little later in the show. But right now we are going to start digging into

the collapse of MF Global. This is a story you've probably seen in the headlines.

We did an in-depth series of articles on full.com. I talked about that on last week's show.

Joining me on the line now, two of the guys who worked on that series of articles,

long time contributors from the Motley Full, Matt Coppin Heffer and Tim Byers.

Guys, thanks for being here. Thank you, Chris. Matt, I'm going to start with you.

In a nutshell, what happened with the collapse of MF Global?

Well, basically, Chris, what you had was this company, MF Global,

it was in the brokerage business, largely the futures brokerage business.

And it ran into some problems, basically poor, compliancing controls internally.

A trader lost a bunch of money for them. They ended up with this investor stepping in Chris Flowers.

He kind of, you know, from the outside, started to try to get the company back into shape.

Eventually brought in a buddy of his, John Corazine, who a lot of people know as a former US senator,

former governor of New Jersey, and he concocted the strategy to turn this broker into a full,

full-on investment bank. What that ended up looking like is taking on a lot of risk at the company,

including a $6.3 billion bet on European debt.

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