Plunge Throws Wall Street into Panic Mode
Friday, 07 May 2010 | by Pat's Picks
Wall Street was thrown into chaos yesterday afternoon after the stock market took a dramatic downturn, dropping almost 1,000 points in five minutes. It eventually righted itself and closed 3.2 percent down. The Wall Street Journal says traders are busy looking through logs to see what could have caused the plunge but assume it was due to an “erroneous trade.” It’s interesting to note that the Journal chose not to play up the angle, published elsewhere, that a trader who entered a trade for billion instead of million could be to blame. Instead, they write: “Many pinned the blame on an erroneous trade for a basket of stocks which caused shares for companies such as Procter & Gamble Co., one of the market’s most stable blue-chip stocks, to fall 35% in two minutes.”
The graphic illustration of the plunge was dramatic enough to go on the front page of most papers:
