[clearf]

What a great question. I do think that, generally speaking, confidence that the markets are stable is good for an economy, and these sorts of events undermine that confidence.

It's important not to understate the cost of failure in these markets. A firm might go bankrupt and have to lay off real people if caught on the wrong side of such an event.

I also think that there is a direct connection between events like the Flash Crash and things like Nasdaq's mishandling of the Facebook IPO, which, again, had real costs in terms of time and money. Both emerge, I would argue, from a similar flavor of complexity.

I'm struggling for an analogy to show that it matters. Maybe it's a little like Target's website going down. It's not Quality, in a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance way, even if it's only down for a short time, and the consequences were "only lost orders." Compelling?

[bcoates]

"I also think that there is a direct connection between events like the Flash Crash and things like Nasdaq's mishandling of the Facebook IPO, which, again, had real costs in terms of time and money. Both emerge, I would argue, from a similar flavor of complexity."

I think this was the point I was missing. So the goal of corrective regulation shouldn't be just to damp wild "flash crash" style transients per se, but to deal with unique anomalous events that commonly arise from the tightly coupled complexity of the market but have individually unpredictable causes and consequences?

[bandrami]

> A firm might go bankrupt and have to lay off real people if caught on the wrong side of such an event.

Why?

If you mean the fund holding the securities, yes, they might go bankrupt. Risk of having that kind of "job".

If you mean the company whose shares are falling, I don't see how that affects them unless they just happened to be issuing their own stock that day (I don't think any of the companies in question were).