Let's stop with the excuses.

You've no doubt been reading a lot about a "crisis of confidence" on Wall Street in recent days after software problems at a big trading firm sent the stock market, briefly, into a tizzy.

Everyone is hyperventilating at the errant trades at Knight Capital Group - suggesting, in the words of Arthur Levitt, that these malfunctions "have scared the hell out of investors." The problems at the firm were immediately lumped with Facebook's glitch-filled initial public offering, the flash crash of 2010 and the rescinded public offering of BATS Global Markets, among others.

Apparently, if the experts are to be believed, these computer errors are the reason "investors are fleeing the markets like never before," Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, told the Los Angeles Times. Dozens of articles about the trading blunder included some form of that contention, using statistics showing that $130 billion or more had been withdrawn from mutual funds over the past year or so.