Catman:

Prepare to be stunned.

Quasi-OMNI:

American banks and airlines are pretty well prepared, but their foreign counterparts are not. European banks have been busy preparing for the Euro, and many Asian banks don't have enough money to fix Y2K. Last night there was a spot on CNBC about a hospital in Taiwan that simply reset the clocks in all the computers in the hospital back to 1990 (the last year in which every day had the same date.) In an effort to guarantee compliance, China Airlines has announced that all its senior executives have to be on China Airlines flights at midnight 12/31/99.

All the world's banks have derivatives obligations with one another in the BIS. As a result, it only takes ONE non-compliant bank in Sierra Leone or Indonesia to bring down the whole system. Similarly, all the world's airlines coordinate through the reservations systems. Connections could be a problem!