Banker Confuses Net and Gross in $6B Error

A junior foreign-exchange trader at Deutsche Bank in London likely blew his chance to become a senior foreign-exchange trader after mistakenly sending $6 billion to a US hedge fund. While his boss was on vacation, the worker dished out a gross value rather than a net amount in a wire transfer in June, ZeroHedge.com reports, via the Financial Times. The so-called "fat finger" mistake—essentially a data-entry error—wasn't spotted under the bank's "four eyes principle," which requires two people to review each trade. It also occurred just a day after the bank announced its latest corporate restructuring. The hedge fund returned the money the next day, but Deutsche Bank could have faced insolvency had the hedge fund balked at doing so. (More Deutsche Bank stories.)