U.S. SEC to meet exchange heads September 12 over Nasdaq outage

Construction crew work outside the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York's Times Square, August 23, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Andrew Kelly

By Douwe Miedema

WASHINGTON | Tue Aug 27, 2013 5:28pm BST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will meet with heads of the major exchanges on September 12 to discuss last week's Nasdaq trading outage, the regulator said on Tuesday.

The meeting with SEC Chairwoman Mary Jo White would address "the market dissemination system involved in last week's halt, as well as other critical market systems and infrastructure issues," the SEC said.

Nasdaq (NDAQ.O) halted trading in the thousands of stocks listed on its platforms last Thursday, including such familiar names such as Apple Inc (AAPL.O), Facebook Inc (FB.O), Google Inc (GOOG.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O).

It had done so after learning that a system that consolidates stock prices coming in from different trading platforms, known as the Securities Information Processor, was not disseminating price quotations.

The SEC has asked Nasdaq and NYSE Euronext (NYX.N) to come up with a timeline of the three-hour debacle, but the rivals have been unable to agree on the details, Reuters reported on Monday.

The outage is part of a series of high-profile trading glitches. On Monday, exchange operator Deutsche Boerse (DB1Gn.DE) halted trading on its derivatives platform Eurex for an hour after technical problems.

Also last week, a technical problem at Goldman Sachs (GS.N) resulted in a flood of erroneous orders in U.S. equity options markets. And on August 6, BATS Global Markets faced an outage that lasted nearly an hour.

It was also another black eye for Nasdaq, which in May agreed to pay $10 million to settle SEC charges over its mishandling of the flotation of Facebook.

White has pledged to move ahead aggressively with proposed reforms that would hold exchanges, clearing agencies and certain "dark pool" trading venues more accountable for preventing outages and other technical problems.

(Reporting by Douwe Miedema; Editing by Karey Van Hall, Gerald E. McCormick and Leslie Gevirtz)

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Cargill sets September 30 for last purchases of Zilmax-fed cattle

By P.J. Huffstutter

CHICAGO | Mon Aug 26, 2013 12:31pm EDT

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Cargill Inc, the United State's third-largest meat producer, said more testing needs to be done on Zilmax and the last cattle fed with the feed additive will be out of its production supply by the end of September.

Zilmax became the focus of attention in the livestock industry after Tyson Foods Inc said on August 7 that it will stop buying Zilmax-fed cattle for slaughter beginning next month.

Tyson, the biggest U.S. meat processor, said it was concerned about Zilmax potentially causing health or behavioral problems for some cattle.

Merck's Animal Health unit announced on August 16 that it would halt U.S. and Canadian sales of Zilmax, pending additional company research and review.

"While Cargill has not linked Zilmax to any specific incidents involving animal well-being, the company does believe more research is necessary to answer recently raised questions regarding the use of this product," the company said in a statement posted on its website.

Zilmax is part of a family of drugs called beta-agonists, a class of non-hormone growth promoters that have been deemed safe for animals and humans by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Such products are fed to cattle in the weeks prior to slaughter to increase weight by as much as 30 pounds of lean meat.

(Reporting By P.J. Huffstutter; editing by Andrew Hay)

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