THIS WOULD BE NO SURPRISE. FINANCIAL COMPANIES HAVE BEEN PLAYING WITH THE BOOKS FOR YEARS

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For the past two years, MF Global Holdings Ltd. may have disguised its debt levels to investors by temporarily slashing the debt it was carrying before publicly reporting its finances each quarter, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal.

The activity, referred to in the financial industry as “window dressing,” suggests that the troubled financial firm was shouldering more risk and using more borrowed funds to facilitate its trading than investors could easily detect from the firm’s regulatory filings.

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SOURCE: MF Global Masked Debt Risks – WSJ.com