Anyone who’s ever seen a Terminator movie knows that civilization ended when a computer system called “Skynet” came alive and tried to terminate the human race by starting a nuclear apocalypse. After last week’s “flash crash” on Wall Street, they might have wondered if Skynet wasn’t working on a financial apocalypse instead.
We still don’t know what happened more than a week later, and a new SEC study will probably raise more questions than it answers. Here’s what we do know: Wall Street has become such a high-speed, high-tech gambling house that it can be plunged into chaos without anybody having a clue what’s happening or the wherewithal to prevent it. “Real time” – where the effects of ultrafast computer events are perceived at human speed – is never less “real” than it is where Wall Street is concerned.
As a reggae rapper named Big Youth once said, “If you ride like lightning you’ll crash like thunder.”
