Just for the record: I doubt electronic stock orders are spelled out with letters

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

In the reporting of the story it has become common to say that someone made a typo between the words million and billion.

That is not likely to be the case. In this newfangled world of ours we use numerals to enter numbers into computer programs.

The typo would be 16000000000 versus 16000000.

I find that typo no less likely than switching the letters. But it is what it is.

On a related note... P&G has only 2.2 billion shares of stock outstanding so I'll go way out on a limb and guess Citi didn't have 16 billion shares to offer.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=PG

So maybe the first step is to have the big banks' trading programs limited to what they actually hold.

[TheWatcher]

1. The Reporting simply shows how dumb they think we all are.

I'm waiting for the "World Is Flat" discovery by top scientists.

They might as well give it a go.

They've gotten away with everything else.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

2. Roman numerals, baby n/t

[ZombieHorde]

3. I unrec threads with no context, so unrec. nt

[ProdigalJunkMail]

7. oh, there's plenty of context...

how'd you miss it?

sP

[gateley]

4. Man, I'd screw up all those zeros, too! nt

[Catshrink]

5. If I use the extra keypad I have with my laptop to type 0's sometimes I hit the 000 key

instead of the 0 key. Maybe they did something like that.

[PurityOfEssence]

6. Hey, good thing there's no Trillion button, huh?

Silly me, questioning the grownups...

[ProdigalJunkMail]

8. as a note...

the latest rumor that i heard was not that it was 16bn SHARES but 16bn DOLLARS of stock to sell...not that it makes any more sense, but they've at least tried to cover the insufficient shares angle.

sP

[Rex]

9. It has become apparent that no one here on DU knows for sure.