It seems that there’s a major headache on the horizon for the computing staff at US Investment Bank Morgan Stanley, and it’s all been caused by the number of Turkish Lira you can currently buy with a single US dollar. Morgan Stanley are handling an Initial Public Offering on behalf of Turkish Conglomerate Sabanci Holdings which will float stock valued at around $210m. This translates into around 30,731,400,000,000 Turkish Lira which Morgan Stanley somehow has to squeeze into its groaning computer system. The figure is so unusually enormous that it will have to be split in half, causing all sorts of attendant problems with keeping track of business. Combine this with an extra 40,000 transactions from the re-shuffle in the Russell 2000 (the index tracking the bottom two-thirds of the 3,000 largest US stocks) at the end of June, and as one member of staff in the computing department put it, Next week’s a very good time to be on holiday.
