Citi Can’t Have Its $900 Million Back

Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-can-t-have-its-900-million-back

Excerpt:

I wonder how many Highly Regulated Excel Spreadsheets there are in the financial industry. Thousands, surely. There you are, doing your job, in your Highly Regulated Excel Spreadsheet. And you get some result you don’t like and you say, well, I dunno, I’ll just multiply everything by 1.02, that seems fine. And then years later regulators are like, no no no, that was a Highly Regulated Excel Spreadsheet, the column labels were sacrosanct, you can’t just type whatever you want there. But of course you could just type whatever you wanted there, because it was in Excel and that’s how Excel works.

Author(s): Matt Levine

Publication Date: 17 February 2021

Publication Site: Bloomberg