| Sumario: | U.S. legislators and the financial world are struggling to understand the causes of an unexpected financial crash. On May 6, 2010, several global markets simultaneously experienced a massive slide, plunging by 9.2 percent in just a few minutes. A satisfactory explanation for the crash has yet to be offered: the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission effectively ruled out a keyboard error and SEC head Mary Schapiro admitted at a Senate hearing that her agency was unsure of what had occurred. The finance blog Zero Hedge, written under the pseudonym “Tyler Durden,” suggested that the widespread use of High Frequency Trading was at the root of the sudden crash and argued that “parasitic players” should be purged from the equity markets.
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