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I know you really shouldn’t laugh at your rivals in business because one should always remain humble and magnanimous but this fuck up is epic, I hate to be the Head of Regulatory Affairs trying to explain this to the authorities.

Citigroup credited client’s account with $81tn before error spotted

US bank meant to send $280 but no funds were transferred despite ‘fat finger’ mistake

The US bank Citigroup credited a client’s account with $81tn when it meant to send $280 – before the “fat finger” error was caught.

The mistake was spotted only after two employees had missed it, and a third employee rectified it 90 minutes after it was posted, the Financial Times reported. No funds left the bank.

The bank disclosed the “near miss” to the US Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

A transaction of $81tn (£64tn) would be so huge that it would be unlikely to go through any bank’s systems. It would have certainly gone down as one of the biggest ever fat finger errors, in which the wrong number is entered in a computer system.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/feb/28/citigroup-credited-client-account-with-81tn-before-error-spotted

How precisely is 81 trillion a fat-fingered 280 dollars? You'd need to drop your prosthetic leg, never mind a fat finger, on the keyboard to get the wrong digits in the wrong order with a bunch of trailing zeros.

One that I am familiar with is when the employee meant to pay somebody in Indian rupees but paid them in pounds with the rupees amount.

At the time I think it was 100 rupees to 1 pound.

To compound the error they put the numbers after the decimal point.

Fortunately this bank has excellent controls in place to stop a near quarter of a billion pound fuck up.

My entire wardrobe from 1999 to about 2004 came from Boo.com where I was working on internal systems but found a bug on the purchase path regarding changing currency.

The bug was you put things into the basket in sterling (say £500 worth) and then switched to French Francs during the purchase process at which point the currency changed but the prices were not updated so the basket converted to 500 francs (or so £45).

So I found the issue and reported it but because I wasn't a tester nowt was done about it.
2 weeks later the problem still existed so I made a large order for delivery to the office, again reported the issue (now with £2000 worth of clothing to demonstrate the issue and an invoice that I think came to £1.27 as we had just5 enabled Italian Lira) and again nothing was done.
So 4 weeks later I decided to order every piece of clothing I wanted AND all my Christmas presents.

And that is why I ended up with a 5 year supply of Helly Hanson and North Face clothing and multiple pairs of Timberland books.

At roughly the same time some Saudi investment fund invested in the company - and for reasons I don't know the purchase was in cash resulting in 2 west end branches of LLoyds bank closing as the money was counted

That shows you how strange the dotcom boom years were.

...

So to sum up, we as a nation are beyond grateful that it turns out the school bully likes his ego massaged and boy did we do a lot of massaging.

Nonsense. The politically thoughtful will have squirmed on behalf of Starmer, and indeed HMKC III who were doing their job for the rest of us. We don't get to choose the other national leaders we have to deal with, nor do we choose where the politics of the last 200 years places us right now WRT what has to be done to protect and defend ourselves. Did Starmer's critics note the affirmation by Trump of Article 5 of the NATO treaty?

Hey slow down, cowboy. I'm Mr Realpolitik so what has to be done has to be done. But I'm interested in how those visceral pro-Lab, anti-Trump types will take it.

It's all very well saying you have to be practical (it's what I say), but you then can't affect to hold some set of fundamental moral values that are inviolate. So interested to see how people finesse it all.

Not very well. If you thought Starmer's star couldn't descend any further you would be wrong. It's like @Big_G_NorthWales posted yesterday, those who might be impressed by Starmer's tightrope walking won't vote for him anyway, and those of us who might have been minded to were outraged by the State Visit invite.

I suspect you're trolling as you were before the election but, in case you're serious, I am one who will probably vote Starmer next time and was impressed by his tightrope walk.

I might be a leftie but I'm not an idiot.

Ah great, we have one.

So I'm sure (were I to trawl back through them all) that some/many/all of your posts about Trump have been condemnatory in the strongest possible terms. If not, then you are unique, and take this post as addressing those whose posts have been.

Either you hold to your view of Trump being the embodiment of all evil, or you think he is someone we can do business with. If you think the former, then what is the point of Starmer supposedly representing a decent, moral code if he jettisons it to humour a tyrant.

It's like me writing you a cheque for a million pounds and keeping it in my back pocket.

What about "Trump being the embodiment of all evil *and* he is someone we have to do business with"?

Notice that the UK did business with Stalin, Mao and some other interesting characters. Signed treaties with them..... Not because we enthused about their moral character, but because we were trying to avert worse things.

This header sums up Starmer's hypocrisy rather well.

Similar tweets and statements from Starmer can be identified on the Winter Fuel Allowance, Foreign Aid cuts, WASPI women, the PM (Sunak at the time) taking what SKS perceived to be unnecessary flights, failing to declare donations, and so on.

I don't actually dramatically disagree with Starmer's actions when he reduces WFA and Foreign Aid, refuses to compensate the WASPI women and goes on lots of foreign trips - all necessary measures. But did he have to be so achingly sanctimonious when he thought others were doing it?

Likewise, I didn't see what the big deal was about the Lord Alli donations - mainly I was very glad that someone else's money had been wasted on needlessly expensive clothes and accessories, rather than my own - but we can be sure that if a PM of a different party had done it that Starmer would have been among the first to pass judgement on such moral failings.

Boris Johnson's arrogance was that knew he was a scoundrel, but wrongly assumed that he could always get away with it.

Starmer's arrogance is of a different sort; he seems to think that anything he does is virtuous because he is the one doing it, but is excessively sanctimonious when his opponents to do exactly the same thing. Most politicians are like this to an extent, but I am not sure I have ever seen it done with such an air of assumed moral superiority before.

This all drives me a little bonkers, but in truth it has very little consequence regarding the running of the government and will not be a defining issue in the next general election, even for me.

On-topic, I agree with the overall consensus that Starmer is thankfully getting on well with Trump, with similar scenes to that of Trump's first visit from Theresa May.

I'm broadly right of centre but mainly centrist in outlook. What used to annoy me about the left was the idea that only left wing politics was virtuous. That anything the left did was for the morally correct reasons. And the idea that the Tories were scum, uncaring, only in it for themselves etc.

The same applies the other way - self-righteous right wingers insistent that Labour are this that and the other.

My politics have become more radical in recent years, but the radical centre. I don't care if the solution that works is left or right. Political ideology is generally a Bad Thing. Used to wind me up good and proper in the Labour Party. Now as a LibDem I get to speak to people who are classic Liberals, old school social democrats, ex Labour, ex Tory and even the occasional ex Nat. Much better.