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Woops. Wall Street’s Barnaby

Tory Maguire

by Tory Maguire

07 May 09:51am

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Filed under: Dow Jones, Gfc, Wall Street, Workplace

23 comments

Rumours are rife last night’s dramatic plunge on the Dow Jones was caused by a Citigroup trader who accidentally sold a billion shares in Proctor and Gamble instead of a million.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh! At least it wasn't his fault. Picture: AP

That little decimal point drama might have been what wiped about a trillion dollars off US stocks before they recovered again quite quickly. You could call it a “Barnaby on steroids.”

We all make mistakes at work, but when most of us stuff up we don’t send the world financial sector into cardiac arrest. What’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever done at work, that had consequences beyond your own yearly review?

Most commented

431Australia, you have nothing to fear but fear itself
390There's no one Thomson won't burn to save his skin
336Animal experiments won't cure me from cancer
313Thomson didn't answer the question everyone is asking
266Who murdered the Arts degree?
231South Australia. It's the middle bottom bit.
231Craig Thomson speaks. Meanwhile, in Australia...
223The world puzzles over Australia's Prime Minister

23 comments

Show oldest | newest first

    • Retiring At Fourty says:

      10:56am | 07/05/10

      Stick with property

      Reply

    • Tom says:

      03:32pm | 07/05/10

      Right - because property never goes down, right? Wrong.

      The Australian stock market has continually outperformed the property market. If you diversify your portfolio sufficiently, you have nothing to worry from things like this. The market will recover if it hasn’t already. You don’t lose anything until you sell.

    • Eric says:

      11:14am | 07/05/10

      I plead the Fifth.

      Reply

    • Phil says:

      12:47pm | 07/05/10

      Don’t you mean the fiftieth?

    • Eric says:

      03:59pm | 07/05/10

      Possibly the five billionth.

    • Rob says:

      11:21am | 07/05/10

      This smells like a cover up for the dickie position that the world economy is still in,debt , debt and more debt

      Reply

    • Paul2 says:

      04:21pm | 07/05/10

      Yes it seems our media minders require us to believe that this was just Wall Street’s wardrobe malfunction.

    • Macca says:

      11:36am | 07/05/10

      Well, Tors, to answer your question.

      One day I recieved a group email from our recruitment team joyfully stating that a large female fashion chain was having a sale. I jokingly fwd’d the email onto a mate at work and made an insinuation about his sexuality.

      Unfortunately, at the time he was making a rather important presentation to his lead team and the first few sentences of the email popped up in the corner of the screen.

      Got a bit of a talking to from HR on that one….

      Reply

    • emgee says:

      12:12pm | 07/05/10

      his fault for not disabling email while running a presentation

    • BTS says:

      01:32pm | 07/05/10

      or her fault for sending it perhaps?

    • Zeta says:

      12:38pm | 07/05/10

      In a past life, I paid my way through university as a projectionist at an insipid multi-story 20 screen monstrosity that took the art of film and reduced it to its lowest common denominator. My last shift was the day before I graduated, which was the day Cheaper By The Dozen opened, which for me really symbolised everything I fear in life - ending up like Steve Martin, once an edgy, interesting guy reduced to being a comic foil in a children’s film.

      The film had already been put together for showing when my shift started, so I chopped off the trailers for The Lizzie Maguire Movie and Rugrats and instead inserted trailers for: House of 1000 Corpses, The Grudge and the Texas Chainsaw massacre. The wailing. The gnashing of teeth. The panic attacks. It was beautiful. I walked down to the manager and quit mere seconds before the first angry Soccer mum started demanding a refund and threatening to sue.

      Management tried to take the refunds for the film out of my last pay cheque - but the MEAA really came through for me and saved my annual leave. So I’ve always had a soft spot for that one particular union.

      Reply

    • James1 says:

      12:52pm | 07/05/10

      Just yesterday I gave a student the incorrect mark for an essay.  The correct mark was two grade levels below the incorrect one I have them at first.  Boy is my face red…

      Reply

    • Graham S says:

      01:26pm | 07/05/10

      Typical Education system & teachers in general, punish a mistake rather than encourage the mind, Imagine if learning to ride a bycycle was a subject, kids would be punished for falling over and for not paying attention in the Learning to Ride class prior to the test.

    • Darren says:

      02:23pm | 07/05/10

      and yet people like Abbott and Rudd blindly follow what ‘the market’ tells them!

      Reply

    • shabangabang says:

      02:51pm | 07/05/10

      Does this mean we have gone from being out of the woods to being back in the woods? Stupid bread crumbs from the RBA have misled us again.

      Reply

    • Overflow says:

      03:10pm | 07/05/10

      Tors, perhaps your piece could be retitled Woops. Wall Street’s Rudd given the result of the PMs foray into international mining incentives and foreign ownership!!  Rudd demonstrated how a PM can have massive effects on markets when compared to the mere rants of a oppositon spokesman.

      Reply

    • nic says:

      03:51pm | 07/05/10

      Yes Tors, don’t forget Rudd has introduced a tax causing instability in the confidence about our nation as an investment option (wiping millions off the value of shares) at the very same time that Greece and the EU are experiencing problems, ones that affect the value of world currencies. So what was it that bid bad ole Barnaby did again?

      Reply

    • Ryan says:

      03:53pm | 07/05/10

      I wonder if Citigroup made a nice profit off that “mistake” ?

      Reply

    • Simon Brodie says:

      03:58pm | 07/05/10

      Whilst working in the corporate provisioning dept of a medium sized telco, I disconnected a call center of a large stock broker, 7 days early,and casing them to loose 1.4mil in commissions. I bought my supervisor some chocolates, and she scored a larger training budget!

      Reply

    • Joe says:

      05:21pm | 07/05/10

      What’s with the Barnaby? Last time I looked Barnaby Joyce was the only one trying to highligt the dangerous situation which now exists in international finance.
      I suppose you might have scored a few brownie points with the establishment, well done.

      Reply

    • Rich says:

      10:49pm | 08/05/10

      I broke the Internet once. Just for a short time.

      Reply

    • wake up to the manipulation says:

      02:23pm | 10/05/10

      As if.
      More like a “Turnbull”
      More Goldman Sachs intervention.

      Reply
 
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