most people kill (themselves) for what the few consider rounding error

JACK O'HANLON
SALT LAKE CITY

There has to be some form of secure regulatory control over these computer financial accounts where you can easily move around billions of dollars in a few mouse clicks and the "money" (I use the word lightly, as we're talking about numbers in a computer) is then dispersed into the so-called cloud and it's then - pick one: "lost, stolen, missing, misappropriated" or otherwise not able to be found.

I have a banker friend who told me "there is not enough printed currency in the world to cover all the cash that sits in (computerized) bank accounts."

In other words, the financial system is simply a bunch of numbers being moved from one computer network to another. Very, very scary.

So, when someone asks - "were did all that money go?"

One of the answers could be - "It was never really there."

Some folks at MF Global had access to the computers that contained the numbers that represented this missing "money." I'd be confiscating their passports right about now.