It pays to check what you type

There is nobody more guilty of mistyping than me. Many of you, who read this blog, will have noticed how I often make corrections to items – sometimes days after they have been published.

Mind you, I am not responsible for publishing data about the financial status of Spain so my mistakes go largely unnoticed. The Spanish finance minister recently announced that, by 2014, the national debt for the country would be 99.8% of GDP. The actual figure should have been 98.9%, a difference of some 10bn euros. It was a simple tying error which has now been corrected.

Although a mistake is a mistake, it will not have the same catastrophic effect that was caused when a dealer at Lehman Brothers wiped £30bn of the FTSE 100 by typing £300m for a trade meant to be £3m.