Some twenty-odd years after our financial world unleashed its Big Bang of technology and regulatory revolution, I have been musing this week about how much the resulting pseudo-anarchy of complex interconnected and largely automated computer based trading systems is to blame for this week's seismic events in the world of global finance.
By this I don't mean that the technology has fundamentally failed - perish the thought of a technologist ever speaking ill of his trade - more the collective inability of the financial world - and it's people in particular - to stay on top tens of thousands of mostly automated daily trades compared with a fraction of that volume pre-Big Bang.
And when this escalation of trading scale and complexity is further compounded with the inherently complex and precarious financial architectures required to support other new phenomena like derivatives markets, you begin to get a sense of things being somewhat out of control. Like Keystone Cops out of control.
As perfectly demonstrated by the fact that last Friday evening Lehman Brothers calmly estimated the extent of their liabilities to be in the region of $40Bn, only to be forced to switch off the lights forty-eight hours later when the true extent was found to be closer to $80Bn.
How much was the Big-Bang technology driven wave of modern complexity to blame?
Or is this merely another example (see my earlier It Takes A Human To Really Screw Things Up) of a chronic institutional failure to navigate systems, culture and behaviours from the old world to our new technology enhanced world?