Barclays plans to challenge the fines. But they should be thrilled that their company stands accused of manipulating energy markets without any individuals actually committing the fraud. FERC proposed only fines for the individual traders who manipulated the markets. Similarly, the Justice Department had the opportunity to nail Barclays traders with criminal charges in the Libor case and passed on it. So bank fraud persists without the kind of accountability that puts the perpetrators behind bars.

And by jury, I mean the candy ass prosecutors at the Department of Justice, who have made an in-house decision that it’s just too hard to indict anyone at MF Global, including friend of Barack Jon Corzine, for stealing billions of customer dollars. It’s just impossible that a friend of Eric Holder’s could be found to be criminally responsible for allowing a company to steal money from its customers to give to its bank, especially when the bank is the much-loved JPMorgan Chase. After all, the Department of Eric Holder is made up of peers of the MF Global crowd, so it’s just like a real trial.

CNN passes along a “no, really this time, seriously” promise that the RMBS (Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities) working group, tasked with looking into securitization fraud, will soon make a major announcement.

Looks like we have another MF Global on our hands. Peregrine Financial Group, a one-man operation run by Russell Wasendorf, ripped off its clients to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, as reported by Reuters. While smaller than the MF Global or the Bernie Madoff scams, on all other levels it’s pretty similar.

Two officers of Sentinel Management, a Chicago firm, were recently indicted in Chicago, Eric Bloom and Charles Mosley. The case was attributed to the phony Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, though the investigation was underway long before the alleged creation of that group. The case is typical of financial fraud enforcement today; there may be criminals in flyover country but ain’t no criminals on Wall Street.

At a House Financial Services Committee hearing today, former MF Global CFO Christine Serwinski will testify that customer funds were used to cover proprietary bets. This comes on the heels of a treasurer at the company alleging that MF Global CEO Jon Corzine ordered $200 million to be moved from customer accounts to cover a payment to JPMorgan Chase. And they still haven’t found the money.

In the most damning evidence thus far of malfeasance at MF Global, Bloomberg reports that former New Jersey Senator and Governor Jon Corzine, while CEO of the company, personally ordered $200 million in investor funds transferred to cover an overdrawn account at JPMorgan Chase.

The money isn’t coming back, and no one is going to jail.

If you needed to appeal to one authority on banking regulation, you could do worse than to consult Sheila Bair, the former chairwoman of the FDIC. And now she’s advocating scrapping the Volcker rule and starting over. She comes at this by looking at the spectacle of MF Global – a brokerage house that would not be covered under the Volcker rule – and asking whether they would be permitted to trade depositor funds on their own account if they were a bank. The answer is far less clear-cut than it should be – and that’s the problem with how the Volcker rule emerged from the sausage grinder of the regulatory apparatus.

Former Senator Jon Corzine faces a House Agriculture Committee panel today, where he will testify that he doesn’t know “where the money is” from customer accounts that was used by his former company, MF Global, to trade on the company account.

Joe Weisenthal points us in the direction of Corzine’s testimony, which he will give without pleading the 5th Amendment, despite still being liable for criminal charges in the MF Global case.