The real millennium bug isn't digital, it's psychological. It's not Y2K itself but everyone's perceptions of it. And in the world's capital markets - where traders sell on rumour and buy on fact - the countdown to the end of the year is already proving to be a jittery one.
At first sight this would appear strange. Overall, most financial markets professionals think computer systems will suffer hiccups rather than breakdowns over the new year. Perhaps the glitches will be worse than those accompanying the birth of the euro, but they will be far from unmanageable.
Trades may fail to settle, back-office systems may spew out corrupted data, but this shouldn't bring business shuddering to a halt. "Manual intervention is a viable alternative in almost every situation," says Jeffrey Werner, treasurer of GE Capital, one of the biggest borrowers in world capital markets.
But despite the likely modesty of the IT problem, virtually all players - investors, borrowers, and brokers - are changing their behaviour, either because the millennium is an unknown quantity, or because they expect that others will behave abnormally too.