Are warp-speed trades leaving SEC in the dust?

Had the \"flash crash\" of May 6 continued unabated, that sudden 998-point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average might have turned into the financial equiv...

Is the SEC being left in the dust? Politico reports that had the “flash crash” of May 6 continued unabated, that sudden 998-point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average might have turned into the financial equivalent of BP’s deepwater oil gusher, spreading a plume of wealth-destruction across the globe. It would have been different from all the famous previous crashes in history, triggered not by human panic but, it appears, by a screwup in computer networks. Experts warned the SEC a few days before of such a possibility and the vast damage it could cause. But no one believes that the markets’ regulators, including the SEC and the many “self-regulating organizations” that police trading, have the capacity to detect and stop such a catastrophe. As in the oil-drilling industry, there’s a massive technological mismatch.

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