“He has been on Wall Street’s side since day one.”

— Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D), in a Reuters interview, on President Obama’s “minimal steps” to regulate banks.

A memo says former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine (D), who was head of brokerage MF Global as it failed and lost $1.6 billion in client money, gave “direct instructions” to transfer $200 million in customer funds to meet an overdraft in one of the firm’s bank accounts, Bloomberg reports.

“The money transferred came from a segregated customer account… Corzine testified that he never intended a misuse of customer funds at MF Global, and that he doesn’t know where client funds went.”

The White House plans to nominate Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank.

Associated Press: “Obama took a strong personal interest in filling the World Bank vacancy after current president Robert Zoellick announced in February he was stepping down. Obama and his advisers considered more than a dozen candidates, including well-known figures in the administration. But in the end, officials said, Obama pushed for a nominee with broad development experience and was particularly drawn to Kim’s innovative work fighting the spread of AIDS and tuberculosis.”

“While Republicans promote themselves as the friendliest party for Wall Street, stock investors do better when Democrats occupy the White House,” Bloomberg reports.

In fact, since John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, $1,000 invested in a hypothetical fund that tracks the S&P 500 “only when Democrats are in the White House would have been worth $10,920 at the close of trading yesterday. That’s more than nine times the dollar return an investor would have realized from following a similar strategy during Republican administrations.”

“The Democratic edge is so large that the party comes out ahead even without counting Bill Clinton (the Democrat with the biggest S&P 500 gain) and George W. Bush (the Republican with the worst market record). A hypothetical $1,000 investment under Democrats excluding Clinton was worth $3,539 versus $3,296 invested under Republicans except Bush.”

President Obama is considering nominating Lawrence Summers, his former National Economic Council director, to lead the World Bank when Robert Zoellick’s term expires later this year, Bloomberg reports.

“A nomination of Summers would bring scrutiny of his previous stints in government, both as former President Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and Obama’s NEC director, as well as his tenure as the president of Harvard University.”

Felix Salmon thinks it’s a bad idea: “The only way to be an effective World Bank president is to be an effective diplomat… Summers himself is the first to admit that he’s no diplomat: he prides
himself on speaking the truth as he sees it. Which is fine if you’re
making millions of dollars advising DE Shaw on their investments. But
it’s not going to help you run the World Bank — or run anything larger
than the Treasury Department, really. Even Harvard was too much for him
to run; giving him the World Bank job would be a disaster.”

The Federal Reserve and the nation’s largest banks “fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing,” Bloomberg reports.

“The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates.”

“A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger. ”

The Pew Research Center finds that the Occupy Wall Street movement had its best week yet in news coverage.

“Last
week, the U.S. economy was the No. 1 story at 22% of the newshole, with
the majority of that coverage focused on the confrontations between
protesters, law enforcement, and the city governments that preside over
the public spaces that have become encampments. All totaled, the Occupy
Wall Street story accounted for 13% of the overall newshole during the
week of November 14-20… That coverage marked a major spike from the
week before when media attention to the protests had dropped to just 1%
of the newshole. It surpassed even the week of October 10-16, when the
protests, largely focused on income inequality, filled 10% of the
newshole as the demonstrations expanded around the country and partisans
began turning it into a major political issue.”

“Hundreds of New York City police officers cleared Zuccotti Park of the Occupy Wall Street protesters early Tuesday, arresting dozens of people there after warning them that the nearly two-month-old camp would be ‘cleared and restored’ before the morning and that any demonstrator who did not leave would be arrested,” the New York Times reports.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s statement: “No right is absolute and with every right
comes responsibilities. The First Amendment gives every New Yorker the
right to speak out – but it does not give anyone the right to sleep in a
park or otherwise take it over to the exclusion of others – nor does it
permit anyone in our society to live outside the law. There is no
ambiguity in the law here – the First Amendment protects speech – it
does not protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a
public space.”

The 60 Minutes report last night on insider trading by lawmakers and their staffs was inspired by a new book out this week, Throw Them All Out, written by conservative activist Peter Schweizer.

Dave Weigel notes one of the “ugliest revelations” in the book is the degree to which Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), then ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, bet against the stock market as it collapsed in 2008.

Schweizer details “no less than forty options trades” in Bachus’s records from July 2008 to November 2008 as he sat in secretive meetings with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke — Blackberries and phones were confiscated to avoid leaks — to discuss the state of the financial markets. The trades “made him wealthier” as “almost nobody else had the information he had.”

And it’s all perfectly legal since Congress is exempt from insider trading laws.

Former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine (D) resigned as chairman and chief executive officer of MF Global Holdings Ltd, Bloomberg reports.

“His resignation came four days after the bankruptcy filing as the company’s bets on European sovereign debt rattled investors. U.S. regulators are investigating about $633 million missing from MF Global customer accounts.”

First Read: “Why not stick around and fix this? Why run away? Perhaps there are legal
reasons to do. Perhaps he thinks it’s the honorable thing to resign.
Maybe he was an absentee CEO and is embarrassed this happened on his
watch. Whatever the explanation, it’s not good for Corzine’s reputation.
The whole point of Corzine’s relevance in politics was his knowledge
and success of the financial world. Politicians can recover from sex
scandals because the public is willing to separate the personal flaws if
the professional work is on the up and up. Corzine’s fall may be harder
to recover from.”

MF Global, the brokerage run by former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine (D), collapsed into bankruptcy when a potential buyer noticed that hundreds of millions of dollars of customer money couldn’t be accounted for, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The probe is at an early stage, and it isn’t clear if the money is
missing or if the inconsistencies relate to sloppy bookkeeping.”

Said one person familiar with the situation: “They still don’t have it figured out.”

Jon Corzine (D), whose political ambitions ended when he was defeated for re-election as New Jersey governor nearly two years ago, has now run his Wall Street firm into bankruptcy, Deal Book reports.

However, Corzine “is expected to receive a severance payment of nearly $12.1 million.”