You may or may not have heard about the ‘bank run’ of panicking customers withdrawing their savings from beleaguered UK lending institution Northern Rock over the last few days. While the phenomenon of snowballing panic causing the initial problem to worsen is an old one, it has moved to populate the online world in parallel with the offline – so many customers are trying to access Northern Rock’s website at once that their servers can’t cope and return 404-page-not-found errors, adding to the impression of an institution in trouble. [Image from Getty, copied from BBC article]

As a side note, the Financial Times is predicting that this is the start of a rough period for finance on both sides of the pond – welcome to Crunch Week.