Banking Up Blog

Here is my own contribution to the eagerly awaited Restoring American Financial Stability Act.

None of the current provisions in the bill seems to address the crucial problem of “Fat Fingers”. On Thursday May 6, Wall Street may have gotten pretty  close to total collapse because some trader supposedly placed an order to sell billions of shares of Procter and Gamble instead of millions.

With 30% of Americans being now considered overweight, the dangerous proximity of the “B” and “M” keys on computer keyboards has been a ticking bomb for quite some time.

Go ahead, check your own keyboard right now: the letter “N” is the only line of defense protecting the financial world from certain failure.
Can we keep counting on this single-letter levee to avoid future disasters?

Worse! Extend your keyboard inspection to the vicinity of the letter B and be very afraid…

A fat finger still greasy from a lunch of hamburger and fries quickly swallowed at the trader’s desk to save time and keep those bonuses up, could result in Trillions, not to mention Gazillions, of shares or dollars being ordered to change hands.

It is not a question of if, but when Armageddon will strike.

Unless we take some serious and immediate action.

This is where my suggested Fat Finger Amendment comes in:

Keycaps shall immediately be re-arranged with the four letters M, B, T and G relegated to each of the far corners of all computer keyboards.

Steve Jobs, please order your software engineers to patch the virtual keyboard software of iPads and iPhones right away.

A relatively new site called GetDebit provides information about “non-credit” card products.

In the US, debit cards that are linked to a bank account, and prepaid cards that are not, get both categorized as “debit” products and have that word printed on the front of the card.  So, GetDebit actually deals with both debit cards and prepaid cards. (In Europe, prepaid cards do not have the word “debit” printed on them, and have other differences like not being necessarily embossed).

GetDebit stands out in its editorial approach: they do write articles about specific products and services without seeking advertising dollars from the companies behind them. This is worth noting in a world where infomercials are almost impossible to distinguish from genuine articles.

Granted, their business model is indeed to advertise products and place the highest bidders at the top of the pages, but they also mention products and do in-depth analysis without asking for ad dollars.

Evidently, we are praising them because they wrote a piece about the API that our company, Plastyc, released last week. And we have never paid them any advertising dollars.