Stock snafu: Someone typed billion instead of million, says CNBC

What just happened on Wall Street? A trade involving Procter & Gamble was mis-entered, as someone meaning to sell several million shares mistyped an order with Citigroup for several billion-with-a-b shares instead, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average down nearly 1,000 points.

That’s the story being flogged by CNBC. The business-news cable channel has attached all kinds of cleverly-worded disclaimers to its report, in case it’s wrong. But the fact CNBC ran the story and says “according to several sources” implies that CNBC reporters and editors believe it’s true.

Earlier reports had blamed the government of Greece, which voted to adopt severe budget-reduction programs in order to qualify for emergency bailout loands to solve the company’s enormous debt, on which hundreds of billions of dollars in payments are about to come due.