Glitch perfect

A shockingly insignificant outage

THE timing was poor. At 11:32am on July 8th, at a time when market turmoil in China and fiscal turmoil in Greece were already causing concerns, trading was halted on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), once the epicentre of America’s financial markets, on which almost all other trading hinged.

For a moment, the stoppage seemed like grounds for panic. It did not help that a mysterious computer glitch had caused United, one of America’s biggest airlines, to ground all its flights shortly beforehand. The excitable speculated that a co-ordinated cyber-attack was under way. The president was being briefed, the White House solemnly declared. Happily, it soon became clear that the problem was an internal failure, not an external assault. United’s troubles were unrelated, it turned out. At 3:10pm trading resumed.

Some bemoaned the computerisation of a business that had once relied chiefly on men shouting at one another. But technology had also helped turn the outage into a non-event. All trading in shares listed on the NYSE used to occur at the NYSE. But liberalising...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1eJ2RsA