If you’ve got your retirement funds in the stock market, you were sweating bullets yesterday. The Dow-Jones Industrial Average, or the 30 stocks that are grouped together to help show an overall picture of financial health, dropped nearly 1000 points starting at about 2:40 in the afternoon. While there’s a lot of worry in the economy as the recession lingers and Europe is in strife over the addition of Greece to the EU, the problem wasn’t the economy this time, it was a computer glitch.
A problem with the software caused a massive sell-off of Procter & Gamble stock, which lead to the biggest intraday decline in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. Not even Darth Vader’s trip into the financial district caused these kinds of problems! P&G alone accounted for 172 of the points lost during the decline, and it’s unknown at the moment just how many of the Dow-Jones listed stocks were also affected by the bug.
Tags: Procter & Gamble, Dow drops 1000 points, technical problems, glitches, glitch causes Dow to plunge, the stock market, unusual computer problems