Uh oh! The magical computer formulas that allow Goldman Sachs to continue making money, forever, as the world burns, have been stolen and sent to Germany! The FBI has arrested a Russian immigrant who used to work for Goldman.

Sergey Aleynikov began working for Goldman in May of 2007 as "vice president for equity strategy." And then he left to go to some firm in Chicago and then the FBI arrested him for "theft of trade secrets" because, they claim, he uploaded all the fancy magical automated trading codes and files to some German website.

According to the affidavit:

"certain features of the [code], such as speed and efficiency by which it obtains and processes market data, gives the Financial Institution a competitive advantage among other firms that also engage in high-volume automated trading.The Financial Institution further believes that, if competing firms were to obtain the [code] and use its features, the Financial Institution's ability to profit from the [code]'s speed and efficiency would be significantly diminished."

Now anyone might have their hands on the Process! It's been sitting on some Germany-based website owned by some Londoner for a month. Meanwhile, "program trading accounted for 49% of all NYSE trading last week, and Goldman as recently as one week ago represented about 60% of all principal program trading". And the NYSE suddenly saw fit to "alter its methodology for reporting program stock trading," leaving Goldman off the list entirely.

Not that we understand any of this but it seems like basically America is even more doomed, now.