$444B 'Fat Finger' Trade Crashed Stocks.Now Citigroup Is Paying the Price | Hacker News Reader

$444B 'Fat Finger' Trade Crashed Stocks.Now Citigroup Is Paying the Price

wsj.com

3 pointsElement_10 comments

> Instead of $58 million, the basket created had a value of $444 billion. A warning sign popped up on his screen but he failed to heed it, the agency said. Citigroup’s controls kicked in and blocked most of that sum from being traded, but a big chunk still made it onto the markets. Roughly $189 billion of the basket went to an algorithm that then sliced it into portions to be sold throughout the day, the FCA said.

If your "controls" can only turn a $444B oopsie into a $189B oopsie...maybe you need tighter controls?

Begs the question - why does it take 2 people to launch an ICBM but only one to make a $444 billion trade?

This begs the more important question... Why does it take only one more person to end the world than to change some numbers in excel?

Capitalism. Seriously. Each owner decides how to allocate resources. Citigroup decided to let one person make wide-ranging decisions.

Wonder how much the loss was. Surely more than $78 million. Citigroup doesn't say the policy has changed (substantively) so I guess the advantages of this… uh… nimbleness must be in nine digits too.

My point was that 2 is really not enough to end the world. Damn their money, it's their problem. Launching nukes should require 200, not 2.

Suppose it actually required twenty, or 200. In that case, would the relevant organisation publish the truth or rather lie and say "two"? I think lying makes a lot of sense. Telling the truth would be like saying "go ahead and kill the most accessible of these 20/200 people".

So I don't think the "2" is very likely to be true.

It could be 200 out of 20k, or something like that. Though yes, you're right, lying makes sense.

It takes more than two. Two is enough to launch, but other silos have override authority. So if two people went renegade they could still be shut down.

Perhaps the USAF nuclear launch system designers were relatively decent humans, who actually cared about the effects of their actions upon the world?

https://archive.ph/LHBT0

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