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
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.