Panic Artists
by digby
This is just strange: they still don’t know what caused the market plunge. Or they’re saying they don’t know what caused the market plunge.
The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq denied that there was any technological glitch in their trading, meaning that the bizarre trades were due to forces outside their control. The exchanges could be telling the absolute truth, or they could be avoiding some embarrassing assumptions people might make in light of past, similar technological problems. (Both exchanges have histories of pricing glitches and blackouts.) Nonetheless, both exchanges unilaterally decided that they would cancel all trades in stock whose prices changed more than 60 percent — the largest single cancellation of stock trades in history.
To traders, this makes no sense: If there were a provable glitch, the cancellations would be fine. But if there was no technical glitch and the system as a whole was just doing its job, then the exchanges interfered with bargain shopping.
Would they do that just to keep everyone from thinking the market is this nervous? I don’t know. But it makes as much sense as any of the other rumors that have been floating around.
I was watching that day and I can’t help point out once again that at the moment it happened the TV was filled with a bunch of Greeks with pitchforks and torches descending on the Greek banking system. (Actually they were armed with Molotov cocktails and they ended up killing three innocent bank employees.) Coincidence?
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