I find that explanation of the market bunjee jump unbelievable. have you, in ANY financial application you have ever used, been prompted to enter a numeric value, using english? if they wanted to sell 212,456 shares, did they have to type "two hundred twelve thousand, four hundred fifty-six"? duh, no, they'll be entering the number.

now, perhaps they were using a trading application that was prompting for a number which was interpreted to be thousands of shares, and the user didn't realize that.

or could just have been the immanent collapse of the European economy...

Maybe it was a display system or something along those lines. Then all those on the floor see the huge number displayed and go into a lemming-like panic.

Considering that we're talking about a trading process that divides a dollar into SIXTEEN increments, it's entirely understandable that someone's finger could hit "b" instead of "m" when they're typing fast.