Although the Indiana troops' error occurred because of mistaken orders, the imputation of cowardice hung over the Hoosier state.
And a software error at Goldman Sachs saw it place enough mistaken orders for stock options on American exchanges to drive prices lower.
That was not true on Monday, during the period when Goldman's computers were spewing out mistaken orders, just as it was not a year ago when the Knight computers went haywire.
The New York Stock Exchange had most of the mistaken orders, but all of the nation's exchanges executed trades for Knight and all agreed to cancel the trading in six stocks that had especially extreme movements.
In 2012, Knight Capital, a New Jersey-based trading firm, lost close to $440m and almost had to file for bankruptcy after a computer glitch caused the firm to execute 150 mistaken orders to the New York Stock Exchange.
Toward the end of the book he rattles off one muppet-fleecing scheme after another, from letting clients place mistaken orders that netted Goldman millions, to constantly switching up the firm's recommendations to clients about whether to buy or sell options on European banks in the middle of the European debt crisis, taking the opposite side of the trade each time.
Progress Energy stock was trading at about $44.57 a share, and a dealer at an unidentified brokerage firm had entered a mistaken sell order into a computer that instantly drove the price to $4.57.
The reputation of the Tokyo Stock Exchange TSEE) was badly dented this week after its flawed share-trading system cost a big bank several billion yen by preventing the cancellation of a mistaken sell order (see article).
Eagleton presents his book as the fruit of "a single, striking thought: what if all the objections to Marx's thought are mistaken?" In order to demonstrate this, each of the chapters of this erudite yet breezy (occasionally too breezy) tract begins with a series of assertions about Marx and Marxism, which Eagleton then proceeds to debunk, one by one.
