A closer look
You might feel terrible about missing a typo in an email to your boss, but at least your fat fingers didn't trigger the "London Whale" disaster. In 2012, a trader manually copying and pasting data from one Excel spreadsheet to another made a catastrophic error in a risk model. The result? A cascading series of terrible trades that wiped out over $6 billion. It’s a comforting reminder that the terrifyingly complex global financial system is entirely propped up by stressed interns using Microsoft Office.
