Knight Capital: Rumpelstiltskin blows a valve

(Before It's News)

How is it that a major market player can lose half a billion dollars in half an hour?

Terror attack?

Act of God?

Nope. A flaw in a computer trading software program.

Well there’s an oopsie! Whoever wrote the code for that “proprietary trading algorithm” is busy hunched over their CV with a big bottle of White-Out these days.

That’s the beauty of the Rumpelstiltskin economy. Billions made, billions lost, absolutely nothing useful provided to society at large.

There was a time long ago when the markets could justify their existence by claiming to provide a capital pool that growing companies could tap into.

Now the markets are dominated by teams of computer programmers and mathematicians and straw-spinning wizards of every stripe seeking to get the better of one another in high-volume automated trading, where they can be in and out of a stock a dozen times in a second.

This provides what useful service to the rest of the economy?

A financial transaction tax would go a long way towards putting the brakes on this foolishness.

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