In fact, based on his long years in the financial business, from CEO of Goldman Sachs to his current job as chief executive of the failing MF Global, Corzine is proof positive that on Wall Street you don’t have to be very good at your job to get paid a lot of money, which is why hatred of fat cats remains a bipartisan pastime—and will for the foreseeable future.

I say this as someone who both personally likes Corzine and who has covered his career from his days as a successful bond trader at Goldman Sachs, when it didn’t take much more than a balance sheet and a phone to make money—and Corzine did, a lot of it. So much in fact that people I know put his net worth at around $500 million, more than enough money to buy multiple elections in New Jersey as U.S. senator and then as governor.

But his record of achievement on Wall Street as someone who had to run something? Pretty poor and it goes beyond his latest flop at MF Global, which was forced to declare bankruptcy Monday morning following massive losses tied to its investments in sovereign debt.

In fact, Corzine’s career has failure written all over it. Yes, he made a lot of money trading bonds over the years, but also lost a lot of money managing people who trade bonds, which made his latest screw-up at MF Global all the more inevitable.

Even friends of Corzine say his management style is erratic at best. For all his affability, he consults with almost no one except a small coterie of advisers, and often makes decisions based purely on gut instinct.

Gut instincts might be good for a trader, but they are lousy in management;  particularly when you’re the manager in charge of reining in risk-taking traders from losing so much money that it might imperil the franchise. At Goldman, that’s exactly what happened. It was Corzine who led Goldman into its first major financial morass (its second one would come just 10 years later and nearly destroy the firm) in 1998, when as chief executive he approved money-losing trading positions along the lines of those committed by the faltering hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. Those trading losses were costing the firm nearly $500 million, and forced the delay of its long-awaited initial public offering, in which Goldman wanted to transform itself from a private partnership to a public company that enriched it partners to no end (Corzine included). Goldman eventually would go public once the Long-Term Capital storm passed and the losses subsided, thanks in large part to a government-led bailout of the hedge fund. But Corzine wouldn’t survive the ordeal. He was ousted by his second-in-command, Hank Paulson, when it became clear that Corzine wasn’t just a lousy manager, he was lousy at the very skill you get paid big bucks at Goldman to possess—risk management. To continue reading, go to:   [The DailyBeast, 10/31/11]