Tom Clancy predicted this kind of thing years ago. Although in his story the catalyst was a foreign power messing with the system. Once things got rolling the automated systems went with it to the point of the whole system crashing. Clancy wrote it so that a retired money guy had to explain to the people in charge what really happened because they were clueless on how the system actually worked. The solution was to simply reset the clock back to what was before the problems began and they pretended it never happened. Some of the discussion on the economy and trading were really interesting in that book.