Assuming that:
- Gox volume can be faked.
- Most Bitstamp Trading is done by bots hooked up to cross exchange price action
- Most Bots are coded to recognise sharp declines as buying opportunities.
Gox price could be manipulated to crash, dragging other exchanges with it. Whale with 10K of Gox coins to arbitraged comes along with a 10K limit order on Stamp. It sits there and scares the hell out of a few causing a bit of a sell off, so he has to reposition it a bit further down.
Gox then starts to climb, just enough to trigger bots on other exchanges to start exerting buying pressure. However, due to the 10K wall on Stamp, exchanges 'recovery' progress is halted, yet Bitstamp bots keep buying into 10K wall cos their dumb programming is telling them to buy.
End result.
Whale shifts huge amount of BTC at very high price. Bot operators are left holding between them 10K BTC at $579.
A great result for the whale....very bad result for the bot operators.