CNBC Report: Today’s Wall Street Crash May Have Been Triggered By A Typo

While news producers scramble to put together a segment explaining today’s stock market crash, they will inevitably try to tie it to larger unrest. And there’s a lot to choose from: the unrest and instability in Greece, the Gulf oil spill, and maybe even the immigration law in Arizona deserve quality reportage. But according to Matt Nesto’s reporting on CNBC, the real reason behind the sudden and severe dip in the Dow Index might have been a typo.

According to some, the market crash (that at one point saw the Dow Index fall as much 10%) may have been sparked by a sudden and significant sell in shares of Procter and Gamble. Nesto reports that, according to multiple sources, somebody hit a “B” instead of an “M” on the keyboard, selling a billion shares rather than a million. Huh. Nesto’s report follows:

You see that below me that it says that trading error at a major firm. We’ve got multiple sources saying that that major firm that reportedly made the trading error is Citigroup. We’ve of course been in touch with Citigroup and they say they have no evidence of a bad trade but they are investigation the situation. I would just repeat that we have had more than one source pointing to Citigroup as the firm that did or issue the errant trade we’ve talked about the b entered vs the m the billion versus the million.

There are a million reasons why a market behaves one way or another, and according to CNBC, Citigroup maintains that they have not uncovered an irregularities in their orders. Investigations behind the sudden crash (which rebounded to a loss of only 3%) will continue, and some are positing a more mysterious “computer glitch.”

Update: According to CNN Radio reporter Lisa Desjardins, the tech error in question may have been on NASDAQ’s end.

For a more complete analysis, check out Geekosystem’s rundown: