Popular digital arts community and message board B3ta.com poses an interesting question of the week – What’s the most expensive mistake you’ve ever made?

Not surprisingly, IT cock-ups make up a large number of responses. But the best one describes what happened when a poorly written storage management script brought down the entire same-day settlement system at a major investment bank.

http://www.b3ta.com/questions/expensivemistakes/post95910/

Apparently, there were $12 trillion of outstanding trades held up by this failure, but they managed to pull it back from the brink and escape with a $100 million fine for non-completed trades. The author’s conclusion: most banks are insane and they never do anything to fix problems until *after* it costs them uber-money.

I can’t vouch for the veracity of this tale, but it’s a great read. Any guesses as to which bank they are referring to? Shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.