The Guy Who Gave Living With Your Parents* a REALLY Bad Name
“Stupidity isn’t a crime. Still, it would be interesting to know who, at this particular poker table, on this particular day, was the fool.”
–Michael Lewis, “Crash Boys“; Bloomberg View (4/24/2015)
From what I know and read, I think it’s as likely that Navinder Singh Sarao caused the infamous 2010 “Flash Crash” as it is that Sarao killed Kennedy.
In other words, given that Sarao was born in 1979 . . . not very.
Instead, as commentators like Michael Lewis allege, I suspect the chickens come home to roost much closer to Wall Street.
As in, nanoseconds away: the time it famously takes for orders on mega-computers “co-located” (i.e., next door) to Wall Street to launch millions of bogus stock market orders (a practice known as “spoofing”).
Roosting Chickens and Proximate Cause(s)
Even if Sarao is somehow shown to be the “Mrs. O’Leary’s cow” of the 2010 Flash Crash, that hardly explains why the city of Chicago — make that, global equity markets — got swept up in the ensuing conflagration.
The proximate causes** of the Chicago fire were such things as non-existent building codes (all-wooden structures); poor zoning (those 
structures were closely packed together); and woefully inadequate fire-fighting capability.
The proximate causes of The Flash Crash were greedy (and very sophisticated) traders; corrupt securities exchanges; and lax, ineffectual regulators (a side effect of something known as “regulatory capture”).
*Every article I’ve seen on Sarao so far ignominiously refers to him as “the guy living with his parents next to London’s Heathrow Airport.”
**Lawyers refer to the immediate, precipitating cause of an event as its cause-in-fact; the underlying set of conditions making the event possible is known as the legal or proximate cause.
