Reporting straight from the Utah Joint Information Center - I am here with Senator Bennett who has announced that the Pakistan Stock Market has crashed. His source is an independant daily Pakistani newspaper, "The Islamabad." No further word is available at this time.

-- Jennifer Bunker (Salt Lake City, Utah) (Jen@bunkergroup.com), January 01, 2000

Answers

Could you further expand on this?? Is the Pakistani stock market open on weekends??

What type of crash, market crash or software / hardware / computer network crash??

-- Keith Mills (kmills@home.com), January 01, 2000.

Where did this report go?

-- Perry Morrison (perry@octa4.net.au), January 01, 2000.

I checked the following Pakistani paper and could find no mention of a market glitch / crash.

The Nation Online (Pakistan)

-- Keith Mills (kmills@home.com), January 01, 2000.

http://www.frontierpost.com.pk/bus2.html

-- Rick Cowles (rick@csamerica.com), January 01, 2000.

I also went to the Pakistani Stock. They DO not work on Saturdays as they have worked on 12/25 ( friday) and 12/28 (Monday)

-- alexis (alexc@katamail.com), January 01, 2000.

http://www.frontierpost.com.pk/bus2.html

Maybe this is the source of the information.

-- beckie (sunshine_horses@yahoo.com), January 01, 2000.

OK sorry yes It has crashed I saw the Frontier Post

-- Alexis (alexc@katamail.com), January 01, 2000.

Thank you Rick Cowles for that source. Here it is in full:

ISE first casualty of the millennium bug

ISLAMABAD (Fortuna) - Islamabad Stock Exchange became the first casualty to the Y2K bug as its computer software refused to knowledge turn of the century. The country's technologically most ill-equipped stock exchange failed to meet the Y2K challenge and the management of the bourse was forced early this week to exclude dates from all transactions, causing all sorts of problems for its brokers. Islamabad Stock Exchange computers insisted that it will be 1st of January, 1900 after midnight of December 31, 1999. The dates and days and settlements will go haywire if the stock exchange lets brokers use dates for recording transactions ahead of the turn of century. For instance, the computer will put all transactions made on January 1, 2000 ahead of the first recorded transaction because the computer will recognise it as a transaction made on January 1, 1900 and therefore just a day short of 100 years before the last transaction. This latest development does not please members of the stock exchange who have been forced to record manually each one of their thousands of transactions for the day.

"The fact that our computers are not Y2K compliant has literally taken us to the early 20th century period, with all members having to manually sort out their transactions," said a member of the Stock Exchange asking not to be named.

-- Jennifer Bunker (Salt Lake City, Utah) (Jen@bunkergroup.com), January 01, 2000.

An fascinating source on this story would be Pakistani Ambassador Ahmad Kamal, Chairman of the U.N.'s Informatics Working Group. (I believe it was he who some time ago got up in the U.N. assembly and very irately complained that Y2K hadn't been a high-priority at the U.N. but could severely affect the materially less developed nations.)

-- Gary Gach (y2k@word.to), January 01, 2000.

Gary;

Right, and it was he who we quoted in our book, as he saw Y2K as an OPPORTUNITY. Interesting that his country should have a problem.

Richard

-- Richard Wright (rtwright@grassrootsgroup.com), January 02, 2000.

I continue to remain unconvinced of the story, as yet. I can find no paper called "The Islamabad" or "Islamabad" nor even an Islamabad Stock Exchange (there is a stock exchange in Karachi, 'tho). No reference in any of the Paki papers, nor Agence France. Apparently the only source so far, the Frontier no longer has it on its top page ... so maybe a search of the site might reveal something.

I've posted a query to soc.culture.pakistan ...

-- Gary Gach (y2k@word.to), January 03, 2000.