![]() ![]() Bloomberg caught wind of the translation online and hastily spread the word that China’s currency was about to jump in value. Attempting to provide various perspectives on how an appreciation of China’s currency, the Renminbi, would affect the local economy, she pulled bits of from various media outlets to form her own collage of facts and opinions.įrom there, a game of multilingual telephone commenced as the Communist Party’s official news source snatched up the article and cranked out a near-unreadable English version that could be interpreted as a confirmation of plans to appreciate the Renminbi, a move that would have weakened the dollar against Asian currencies. Guan Xiangdong, a tourism reporter for the China News Service, was tasked with filling in for her finance reporters that were on vacation in May 2005. With the crisis averted, one could only be left to wonder just how easily a single misguided headline could crater the global economy if left unchecked.ĩA Poorly Translated Article Devalued The US Dollar To get things back on track and prevent a total corporate meltdown for an airline that had been doing fine before reports claimed otherwise, trading was halted for an hour to sort the problem out. ![]() Traders jettisoned 15 million shares, as the stunned company did its best to disabuse Bloomberg of the disastrous misconception. The reporter then relayed the information to Bloomberg, a premier name in finance news, and as soon as the story went up, United Airlines’s stock price nosedived by 75 percent. As a result, the Google web crawler assigned it the date of the search, giving the impression that a half-dozen-year-old crisis was breaking news. In September 2008, a reporter for Miami-based Income Securities Advisors found a 2002 article about a financially moribund United Airlines filing for bankruptcy. A typo or wrongly worded description of changing conditions in an industry can precipitate a mad rush to buy or dump shares, crippling whole companies and economies. Swiftness and accuracy in reporting is essential. The stock market is a finicky, fickle animal that improves and implodes with each new financial forecast. 10A Six-Year-Old News Story Almost Bankrupts United Airlines But in a world where headlines can travel as far and fast as technology allows, even a simple underestimation of the public’s sensitivity to an issue can spark a caustic controversy. Media-induced muck-ups and outrages are virtually preordained as due diligence and restraint fall to the wayside in pursuit of being the first to break a story. The rapid free-flow of information is a curse-pocked blessing. ![]()
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