People like me who care about good English are often accused of being pedantic but a court case earlier this year showed that a missing decimal point can have costly implications. A UBS commodities trader was tempted to leave his job to take up a new position at JP Morgan by an annual salary equivalent to £2m. But it transpired that JP Morgan had made a disastrous typo in the trader’s contract and, in fact, had intended to pay him only one-tenth of the stated amount – £200,000 a year! The trader’s case for lost earnings reached the High Court, which ruled that the bank may need to brush up on its proofreading but did not have to pay the inflated salary.
