What's up guys and welcome back to wall street millennial on this channel, we cover everything related to stocks and investing. Currently, russia has about 100 000 troops stationed on the ukrainian border. In what could be a preparation for invasion, the situation is very tense and putin could order his troops to invade at any time. Thousands of ukrainian soldiers are in world war, 1 style trenches in some cases, only 100 meters away from pro-russian separatists.

So far, a war is not broken out and most people are still holding out hopes for a diplomatic resolution. However, if you're a subscriber to bloomberg news on february 4th, you may have had a different idea. They publish a headline saying quote: russia invades ukraine. Unquote in this state on the homepage, for about 30 minutes, this was completely false.

Russia had not invaded ukraine, it's hard to overstate what a blunder. This is, especially when the stakes are so high. For a long time, bloomberg has been considered one of the most reputable sources in the financial media in this video we'll look at how they ended up making such a stupid blunder and whether they'll be able to recover their credibility for the past few weeks. Bloomberg news has been following the russia, ukraine situation and reporting on it.

Just like almost every major news outlet. On february 4th many bloomberg news, readers were shocked to see a new headline on the homepage, saying that russia had invaded ukraine, given how tensions have been escalating. The headline didn't seem far-fetched, no other media outlets had reported the same information, but maybe this was just because bloomberg was ahead of the game and reporting on breaking news. The fastest within 30 minutes bloomberg retracted the headline and published the following apology.

They said that they prepare many headlines for scenarios that could happen in the future. Russia invades. Ukraine was one of those scenarios and they accidentally published it. They say they are actively investigating the cause of this mistake, but have yet to give further details.

It's hard to overstate what a massive blunder this is. Ukrainian soldiers are within a few hundred meters of pro-russian separatists in some places. If any of them were reading bloomberg news, they could have erroneously thought that russia invaded and started shooting at the opposing troops. Given how high tensions are a small accident like this could actually start a war? Fortunately, this did not happen, but it highlights how dangerous the situation is on the border.

Media companies always want to be the first ones to cover breaking news whenever big events happen, such as one country invading another, they want to put up the article as quickly as possible. It's common practice in the industry to create a wide range of contingent headlines and thumbnails. For example, before the 2016 presidential election newsweek distributed print magazines, showing hillary clinton as the winner, they told the retailers not to sell the copies before the election was called, but some of them did anyway. They had actually developed two versions of the same magazine, one for clinton and one for trump.

This way they are prepared, regardless of the election outcome. What happened at bloomberg was a breakdown in internal controls, and this is an especially big deal for bloomberg. Bloomberg terminals are almost universally used by investment bankers and hedge fund traders to monitor financial data in real time. Bloomberg news is integrated with the bloomberg terminals, and professional traders often use the headlines to inform their decisions.

The russian ruble has experienced volatility as a result of rising tensions with ukraine if they actually do invade. This could lead to economic sanctions from western nations, which would likely cause the ruble to depreciate. If currency traders saw the headline it could lead them to start shorting. The ruble, given that the headline was up for only 30 minutes, it's unclear if anyone made any trades based on this false information, but if they did, they could probably sue bloomberg for any trading losses they suffered.

We all make mistakes, but unfortunately, for bloomberg. This is not the first time they've reported false news. In 2016, a french construction company called vinci saw its share price fall by almost 20 percent after bloomberg and other news outlets report that they fired their chief financial officer and would revise its past two years of financial statements. If this were true, it would likely mean that the company engaged in some type of financial fraud bloomberg was informed about the development when they received an email from the company which linked them to an official press release.

They almost immediately reported on the story. As it turns out, the email was fake. It was associated with the domain name, vinci group.com, while the company's real website is vincigroup.com. The email was a total fabrication, probably sent by a short seller, trying to manipulate the stock downwards.

The french financial regulator fined bloomberg 7.6 million dollars for the incident as a financial media company, they were negligent by reporting market moving news without independently verifying it. While that was also a mistake, it arguably wasn't so bad. They were a victim of a hoax. So the bulk of the blame should go to whoever created the false press release, while the russia invades ukraine was a big blunder.

The important thing is for them to learn from their mistake and improve their internal safeguards. Ever since the fake french press release in 2016, they haven't made the same mistake again. Hopefully, they'll hire some new editors to approve headlines before they are published so that they can avoid another potentially dangerous mistake like this most recent one bloomberg news is still one of the most widely followed financial media outlets, and michael bloomberg is worth about 70 billion dollars. If anyone has the resources to fix this problem, they do alright guys that wraps it up for this video.

What do you think about bloomberg's false headline? Do you still trust bloomberg news going forward? Let us know in the comments section below, as always. Thank you. So much for watching and we'll see you in the next one wall, street millennial, signing out.