A Falência da Knight Capital, Mais um Capítulo da Auto-Destruição de Wall Street

É impressionante, parece que em ano eleitoral a bandidagem de Wall Street fica ainda mais serelepe, irresponsável e criminosa. Parece um esforço orquestrado para destruir o sistema financeiro. O mais recente capítulo é a impressionante queda da Knight Capital. O WSJ mandou bem: Small enough to fail, the stock brokerage lost close to 80% of its value over two days after a botched software upgrade unleashed a flood of erroneous trading orders into the market. Knight's mistake caused a surge in volume and bizarre price gyrations in the shares of dozens of public companies. Drawing another distinction with the Washington crowd, CEO Thomas Joyce and his Knight colleagues passed up opportunities to blame anyone else for their big blunder. But investors are right to wonder why such blunders seem to happen more often lately. From the 2010 "flash crash" to trading snafus at Facebook's initial public offering in May, the basic plumbing of the equity markets has never seemed so troubled. Adding an almost comic irony to the series of market missteps, in March of this year a stock-trading platform called BATS bungled its own IPO. With President Obama lately conducting a rhetorical frontal assault against the market economy, it may seem that these glitches in capitalism's inner sanctums couldn't come at a worse time. But we are not exactly seeing the failures of a free market at work.