Fat-fingered or plain trigger-happy?

Call it the downside of having the world at your fingertips, but those fiddly phalanges can cause some pretty serious damage.

It takes just one misguided tap to set off a nuclear conflagration as easily as turning on the microwave or booking anew home entertainment system in the ongoing online festival sales. And if that finger happens to be oversized — as so much of the urban population in advanced countries are — it can wreak Hurricane Matthew-like havoc on the stock and money markets.

In a scenario very sensitive to ‘tips’, it is not surprising that the proverbial ‘fat finger’ is being blamed for the ‘flash crash’ in the Asian markets that wiped 6 per cent off the pound sterling on an early Friday sell-off.

Pressing several keys instead of (the correct) one is not an unlikely occurrence if finger pads are of cushion-like dimensions, after all.

However, given that an increasing number of market trades are computer-driven — at speeds humans could not possibly achieve — it must be pointed out that such algorithmic transactions cannot possibly have the sort of digits that could develop size problems and cause catastrophic malfunctions.

As the South African rand plummeted 9 per cent in 15 minutes this January and New Zealand’s dollar fell a per cent less in August 2015 as part of an ongoing series of flash crashes, it seems far more likely that trigger-happy — rather than fatfingered — robots are at play these days.

If not voters who create conditions for panic to be a sensible response.