Flash Crash. Frankly, that should not be a real thing; that should not be a part of history. But it is.
On the 6th of May, 2010, for but a single day, not much more than a moment on a greater scale of financial time, a thousand points of market value just sort of vanished... into... thin air.
Why? Because, among other factors, a bunch of machines, made by man of course, got confused when some particularly nefarious machines bombarded the market with bogus misleading trades, likely sent by other machines constructed by men.
There was a day when being on the floor, that very proximity to the bleeding heart of finance, meant something for your ability to trade stock. Now, it's a matter of having your computers closer to the market's servers so you can ping trades as fast as possible. Talk about market wizardry.
You can call up the silly thought that some AI is messing with the market for shits and giggles, or that the flash crash was an act of terror on the part of some idealogical group, but the more likely answer is that flash crash was caused by one of these firms attempting to mess with the others. Mathematicians get snatched up by these financial monsters to craft armaments with which to wage war, or, rather, to game the system. And game it is. I can't imagine much else that can explain the kind of behavior we are facing. Tin, or silicon, men wound up to scream trades at one another at a blistering speed so that other machine minds can quickly devise new lines for the song that ends the world.
Whether these minute fluctuations are noise, the byproduct of the complexity of the algorithms used to conduct High Frequency Trading, or the deliberate result of some agent, the really terrifying aspect of this is the rest of humanity who couldn't give less of a shit. Fuck discussing the whole world; even if we just consider the American economy, the fact that so much money, and intelligence--mind you, someone "smart" had to think this shit up, was put into constructing these machines haunts me, as it should their makers, their masters--which may not be one and the same. Someone built these things to manufacture wealth, as oppose to actually devoting their power to some kind of venture that may actually effect, and, perhaps--even, help, people directly, as opposed to the nebulous actions of The Market.
The game of greed is just that, a game, a past time to divert ourselves from the real tasks at hand. Let's hope that we can work together on something a bit more important.
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Real thoughts on the matter can be found here: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/08/market-data-firm-spots-the-tracks-of-bizarre-robot-traders/60829/
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