Today's award goes to the person or persons at Deutsche Bank responsible for making a transfer in error . . . a payment that exceeded the entire market value of the bank!
A routine payment went awry at Deutsche Bank AG last month when Germany’s biggest lender inadvertently sent 28 billion euros ($35 billion) to an exchange as part of its daily dealings in derivatives, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The errant transfer occurred about a week before Easter as Deutsche Bank was conducting a daily collateral adjustment, the person said. The sum, which far exceeded the amount it was due to post, landed in an account at Deutsche Boerse AG’s Eurex clearinghouse.
The error ... was quickly spotted and no financial harm suffered.
. . .
While such errors do occur, the amount involved -- more than the bank’s market capitalization of around 24 billion euros -- is highly unusual, according to the person.
There's more at the link.
Dammit, why do such banking errors never end up in my account? I'm not sure how much of $35 billion I could withdraw and/or spend before they noticed, but I'd work on it as hard and as fast as I could, I promise you!
Peter
3 comments:
These things happen quite often. There's a recent example in Korea - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-sec-error/samsung-sec-fat-finger-debacle-deepens-as-pension-fund-halts-trade-idUSKBN1HH07O - which seems to be more serious than the DB one in that it took longer to be caught.
I, once upon a time, was briefly the inadvertent holder of wheat futures because a broker's back office accidentally mingled my share sale transaction with the adjacent transaction to buy several million dollars of wheat futures. I got a lot of automatically generated paperwork requiring me to register as some kind of special investor because of those futures too. Happily before I could figure out what to do and whether I really needed to fill out the paperwork I was informed that the transaction had been voided and I should ignore it.
Math is hard, m'kay?
No wonder interest rates that are paid by banks are so low.
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