Felix Salmon

@felixsalmon.com

5933 Followers 418 Following

Host, Slate Money. Author of THE PHOENIX ECONOMY.

We talk from time to time around here about my favorite postmodern comedians, the people who design user interfaces for Citigroup Inc.’s internal software. If you work at Citi, you come in every day and open up some proprietary software to do trades and send money and stuff, and that software has a bunch of fields you can fill in and buttons you can press to do things, and some of them are pranks. Like there was allegedly a field in some payments screen that “came pre-populated with 15 zeros, which the person inputting a transaction needed to delete”; if you forgot, apparently typing “$1” in that field would send the customer $1,000,000,000,000,000? Just hilarious Dada-esque comedy. Citi appears to do this stuff out of genuine commitment to the bit, but pitfalls like this exist at every bank. Every bank has software with fields that you can fill in and buttons you can press, and you are tired and distracted and you might, say, put the dollar amount of your trade in the “shares” field and sell 7,548 times as much stock as you intended to sell. That really could happen anywhere, though in fact it happened at Citi. More generally, it is the nature of software that any piece of software will contain a button you should not push, just to make life exciting. (For me it is the “Publish” button in this column’s content management system. Have I ever published a half-written draft by accident? No. Do I think about it every day? Yes. Have I jinxed myself by writing this? Of course.) Probably most banks do not give their employees software with a big red button labeled “LIQUIDATE BANK,” which when pressed initiates a liquidation of the bank, though Citi might. (No, I’m kidding, at Citi the liquidation is probably triggered by a small green button labeled “Help.”)
A bar chart that illustrates the components of Donald Trump's wealth. The chart shows the value of his $TRUMP memecoin at $57 billion, DJT stock valued at $4.59 billion, and other assets totaling $2.57 billion.