Jon Corzine looked as if he knew he was in trouble.
It was October, and I found myself sharing an elevator with the former chief executive of Goldman Sachs who, until November 4, ran MF Global as the brokerage company's chairman and chief executive.
Today, Mr Corzine is embroiled in what has become the eighth-biggest corporate bankruptcy in US history, and regulators have stepped in to track down more than US$600 million (Dh2.2 billion) of clients' money that is unaccounted for.
On this particular autumn day, Mr Corzine looked somewhat dishevelled as he cradled a thick stack of newspapers under one arm and had stray hairs poking out from the sides of his head.
When someone asked him about the papers, Mr Corzine confided he had been reading the negative news about his recent performance.
And he looked more than a little tired. At one point, he didn't even react visibly when he slumped against a wall in the elevator, then threw his head back with a cringe-worthy "thud".
Many executives may relish holding all the power at the top, but what is it about some that leads them to take enormous risks with their businesses?
In Mr Corzine's case, it is still too early to say exactly how much he may have contributed to MF Global's collapse.
But the company's bankruptcy filing occurred after its risky bets on European sovereign debt. Analysts decried those bets as they downgraded MF Global's status to "junk" just before it crumbled.
Mr Corzine spoke at a steak dinner in front of bankers and traders only the night before his former company posted its biggest quarterly loss, Bloomberg News has reported.
A study conducted by the University of Melbourne and published in the International Journal of Managerial Finance in 2007, concluded that finance executives were "risk neutral or slightly risk prone on average".
This "contradicts the standard assumption of risk aversion so often invoked in finance", the study said.
Les Coleman, the study's author and a senior lecturer in the university's finance department, said gutsy executives did not see viable alternatives to risk taking and were often confident of success.
In other words, Mr Coleman argued - and other researchers have made the same point - these executives "believe that they can beat the odds … and that they have special abilities".
A paper released in August takes a more unusual approach to assessing how chief executives who are risk takers in their personal lives may influence their companies' policies.
Researchers homed in on chief executives who were licensed aircraft pilots, since experts argue that the desire to fly is a genetic personality trait that is associated with risk taking.
The authors of the paper found that a genetic predisposition towards personal risk taking could extend to the executive suite and influence corporate decision making.
Risk-taking chief executives, the researchers argue, tend to run companies that have more frequent acquisitions and greater stock return volatility as well as take on higher leverage, which increases risk.
But this is not always a bad thing, the researchers say. In fact, these findings may help explain why top brass such as Eric Schmidt of Google, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Richard Branson of Virgin not only like to fly aircraft but are also successful risk takers in at least some of their businesses.
As is the case with many studies, though, the results may not always help explain everyone's behaviour. Mr Corzine does not appear to pilot his own plane personally.
Yet any appetite for risk that he might possess could be linked to another hunger: a desire for the rush one can getfrom an involvement in politics.
In fact, when I ran into Mr Corzine in that elevator in October, it was two years ago. He was still the governor of the state of New Jersey. And all of those newspapers he was holding had articles with poll results showing him slipping in the final days of his re-election campaign.
He lost that race, of course, and ultimately left politics to run MF Global. The move was a risky one in hindsight, to say the least, although perhaps future research may tell us what links there may be between being at the top in the risky worlds of politics and finance.
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