Reporting and opinion by Mathew Carr

May 21, 2025 — One of the more amusing elements of Bloomberg LP’s shutdown today was the Financial Times’s mocking story of the episode.

Bloomberg, supposedly the gold standard data and news provider for financial market traders, struggled to serve its customers for a couple of hours earlier today because of some sort of fault/error/stress test, forcing the delay of EU, UK and Portugal government bond sales and the lowering of trading levels (FT, Bloomberg). Opportunity costs temporarily skyrocketed.

Banks, hedge funds and commodities firms are some of Bloomberg’s biggest customers….government treasuries, central banks and family offices too. It’s a secretive organisation overseen by Mr Climate Transparency Michael Bloomberg. Conflicts of interests run out of regulatory control.

For a start, the FT’s coverage included this meme, effectively labeling Bloomberg’s trader customers as brain-eating zombies…mean in a special way, especially since the FT targets the same mob.

“Would you say it’s time for our viewers to crack each other’s heads open… and feast on the goo inside?”

The comments sections of the FT stories were amusing.

I repeat some of them below (forgive me FT)

Bloomberg down whilst capital controls are imposed?

At least the whole world isn’t reliant on one tech platform for finance / trading. Oh wait.

[On who to blame]

Russians?

Mossad

I-ran!

[On what to use instead of Bloomberg]

My favorite in this section was “Mumsnet” … probably the most influential website in the UK after Bloomberg.com. Maybe before Bloomberg.

There is some deep wisdom in the FT comments humor.

It’s quite easy to switch from IB (Instant Bloomberg) to alternative messaging systems such as the forums on mumsnet or Libor-rigging What’s App (not that I’m saying IB went down this morning).

With these online transactions/trades via middlemen like Bloomberg and others, it IS becoming more easy to switch to other providers … or it will be once politicians catch up to what’s needed to make the financial system work better.

That’s why many of these tech companies including Google/Alphabet, Meta, Amazon are vastly overvalued and much more fragile than many investors seem to think … especially when regulators catch up and force proper competitive tension in these markets in the interests of “the people”.

One way to install more competition is to force the sale of businesses that currently lie within oversized, systemically important conglomerates like Bloomberg. This would create more tension and transparency between supply and demand and erode rip-off spreads and margins.

Systemically important banks should be part nationalised mandatorily and run by the people, since the people hold the risks.

There should be mandatory competition in markets and for (large) transactions — to push down profit margins in the interests of society.

(I was fired by Bloomberg five years ago after calling it out on its bad climate news coverage. This story was hacked sometime in the past 14 hours.)

Notes

Grok unchecked

Global systemically important banks, or G-SIBs, are major financial institutions whose failure could-SIBs, are major financial institutions whose failure could disrupt the global economy.

The Financial Stability Board, in consultation with the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, updates this list annually based on size, interconnectedness, complexity, and cross-jurisdictional activity.

For 2024, the list includes 29 banks, unchanged from the previous year, though some shifted in risk categories. Notable names include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, among others.

Exact names vary slightly year to year, but these are consistently flagged due to their massive influence.

The focus on these banks stems from their too big to fail status, a term popularized during the 2008 crisis when governments bailed out giants like Citigroup.

Critics argue this creates moral hazard, encouraging risky behavior since banks know they’re likely to be saved. Others say stringent regulations, like higher capital buffers, mitigate this. If you want the full 2024 list or specifics on why certain banks are included, let me know!

Other comments

NOTE:

“Issues” and loss of functionality are not descriptions that help people understand what went wrong …I’m guessing Bloomberg is covering up the truth … yet again.