Meltdown (30 page)

‘Proud of me?’ he asked.

‘Well yes, of course,’ Monica replied, but not perhaps with sufficient enthusiasm for Jimmy’s puffed-up mood.

‘You don’t sound too sure,’ he complained.

‘Don’t forget, Jim, you haven’t actually done a
good
thing. You’ve just
not
done a
bad
thing.’

‘I think you’ll find,’ Jimmy said, very slightly huffily, ‘that these days, with everybody grabbing what they can, not doing a bad thing actually counts as doing a good thing.’

‘Well,’ Monica laughed, ‘it’s come to something when the decision not to insider trade represents the moral high ground. Wouldn’t do for your dad, would it?’

Squeezed BlackBerry

Jimmy took the tube to work. This was not out of any premonition of imminent poverty. The blow when it fell came as a surprise. It was simply that the tube was how he always travelled to work, a fact that astonished his colleagues.

‘It’s not because of all that
green
bollocks, is it?’ they would ask. ‘You do know that global warming’s a myth? In fact, apparently, using public transport creates more carbon than driving your own car.’

‘Nothing to do with eco, mate,’ Jimmy replied, ‘just good old-fashioned common sense.’

It was at least three times quicker on public transport than using a driver, and besides Jimmy liked to read the paper on the tube, something which made him feel sick if he did it in a car. Leaving as early as he did, he usually got a seat and so arrived at work comparatively rested, well-informed and stress-free. Qualities which were often cited as evidence of Jimmy being a sane man in the nut house. A steady man, a grounded man. The sort of man the company needed.

But times were changing rapidly and as Jimmy descended into the underground network he was blissfully unaware that his easy-going charm was about to prove no defence against the boom-and-bust nature of unregulated capitalism.

The papers were full of the government bailout of Caledonian Granite. The Prime Minister was getting a lot of credit for it and many editorials went so far as to suggest that this might be the beginning of the end of the downturn. There were others, of course, who assured their readers that this was not even the end of the beginning and that a far greater financial crisis was looming. Jimmy wished they wouldn’t write pieces like that. He and his colleagues all agreed that the more the papers talked about a crisis, the more likely one was to occur.

‘Six months ago,’ they’d tell each other, ‘Joe Public wouldn’t have known his sub-prime from his arsehole. Why does he need to know now?’

‘He doesn’t know now,’ others would say. ‘He’s as ignorant as he ever was. The papers are scaring the public with language they don’t understand. It’s what Roosevelt said in ’32,
we have nothing to fear but fear itself
.’

They all agreed that this was true, although sometimes Jimmy did point out that while Roosevelt said there was nothing to fear but fear itself, what actually happened had been nearly another half-decade of the greatest economic depression in history.

He shifted uneasily in his seat and tried to distract himself by turning to the football. It didn’t help. The news was financial there too, with commentators speculating that the downturn might spell the end of the twenty-million-plus transfer fee.

Could the boom times really be coming to an end? It seemed so unlikely; after all, he’d had the opportunity to make two hundred grand only that morning. If a bloke could still make that kind of cash while he slept, how could the party be over? Except, of course, that the opportunity to make that money had arisen from a tip-off to cash in on the government bailout of a company which had collapsed because of the crisis. Just because some people can make a killing in a fire sale, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t a fire. Fuck.

Jimmy resolved to heed the signs, to start thinking about reducing his personal exposure. Webb Street was a very big project. Servicing the debts that he’d entered into so blithely consumed all of his income and a large part of his expected bonus. A bonus which he now had to accept would be much smaller than his previous one.

Perhaps he’d try to bring in a partner. He’d talk to Rupert. Maybe the Royal Lancashire itself would want to exchange some of its debt for equity.

But by the time Jimmy left his seat at Canary Wharf, his naturally resilient and optimistic personality had reasserted itself and his doubts had faded. Jimmy’s spirits always lifted as he emerged from the tube station. You simply could not ride those escalators and step out into the heart of Britain’s financial capital without feeling the sheer pulsating energy of the place. It never ceased to give him a thrill; the buildings were just so
beautiful
. All black glass, mirrors and steel. Just like the cars.

Cathedrals to money. To success. To growth and expansion. This was the sort of thing that once upon a time they had only had in America. Now London had its own little Manhattan and we were finally taking on the Yanks at their own game.

It had all changed so much since Jimmy’s first morning in the money pit back in the early nineties. Back then, most of the great skyscraping cathedrals had existed only in the dreams of visionary architects. Back then, the business of making money still retained its belligerent, hard-edged eighties feel. People modelled themselves on Gordon Gekko from
Wall Street
with all that ‘lunch is for wimps’ business.

Back then, brokers and traders felt under siege, the unrecognized prophets of a new and as yet unloved philosophy neither trusted nor understood by the public. The post-big-bang City strutted aggressively in its stripy shirts and braces, challenging the rest of the nation to come up to speed. Like the industrialists and mill owners of the nineteenth century, those guys knew that they were on the frontiers of new wealth creation and as such were inevitably resented and feared. To them the emerging futures and derivatives markets were like the Spinning Jenny weaving machine or James Watt’s bouncing kettle lid, a new and unstoppable money-making innovation which the Luddites would of course attempt to smash.

It was all so peaceful now, thought Jimmy, as he strolled across the wide piazza that had been laid out in front of his building. Back then there had been tension in the air. The Poll Tax rioting of the late eighties was fresh in the memory; the disaffected still had teeth.

No wonder the Gekko clones had wanted to avoid lunch. For a start, there was nowhere to have it. There had been no splendid plazas and mall complexes nestling at the feet of the great glass towers then. No numerous coffee franchises and mouth-watering food outlets with their commitment to quality
and
protecting the environment
and
ensuring a fair deal for farmers in the third world.

No Starbucks. It seemed unimaginable now.

But the foot soldiers of the new economy had campaigned on booze, Snickers bars and cocaine. Those guys would not have dreamed of wasting fifteen minutes in a queue of PAs to get a bucket of vanilla-flavoured foam.

Society had sneered at them in those days, calling them ‘yuppies’ and ‘Thatcher’s children’. Left-wing playwrights and smart-Alec comedians had dismissed Jimmy’s predecessors as no better than robber barons. Back then Canary Wharf had felt like the forward base of an invading army, a New World outpost in which an elite force was massing to colonize and subdue the old.

But things had changed so quickly and now, with the new century already nearly a decade old, everything was different. There were no left-wing playwrights and comedians any more; there was no left-wing anybody. Britain was at ease with its prosperity. It was the world’s fourth largest economy. Who could have predicted that? And yet it had happened on Jimmy’s watch. That was pretty cool, he thought. The dirty, depressing, angry, violent, sullen and resentful little island into which he had graduated was already ancient history.

Money was no longer the preserve of nerds and Neocons. Cool people dug money.

No more ‘lunch is for wimps’. Now there were chill-out hubs in the corners of offices and it was possible to book a foot massage at your desk.

Greed was no longer merely good, as Gekko had said. Greed was actually
hip
.

The world had changed and it would take more than a poxy bit of toxic sub-prime to turn back the clocks.

Jimmy’s office was in the Dildo. Obviously the Dildo was not the building’s real name; its real name was the Banana. Designed by an internationally famous architectural firm to rival the Gherkin, it had for some time been the most talked-about building in Europe, although in the race to produce the most radically bent building David’s rapidly rising Rainbow looked very much set to trump it.

The idea behind the Banana was that the vast tower should be curved. This would enable the top ten floors to each have the illusion of being the penthouse, as their glass-caged verandas (located on the convex side of the building) would have nothing above them.

The problem had arisen when the commissioning consortium had pointed out to the internationally famous architectural firm designing the building that a
real
banana was inherently badly designed as inspirational fruit for a landmark building. The problem was it tapered away so brutally at the end. The premium floors in a skyscraper are of course at the top. The internationally famous firm of architects had therefore been instructed to change the design to ensure that, instead of tapering away, it should swell out to provide more floor space at the top rather than less. This created a kind of ‘head’ on the banana.

Or in fact a Bell End. Hence the name by which the whole country came to know the Banana was the Dildo, or more commonly the GBC or Great Big Cock.

Of course the testosterone-driven occupants of the Great Big Cock didn’t mind the nickname at all; it seemed very apt. Financial trading floors were the last exclusively male preserve, places where the vocabulary was numerate, not literate, and where nurturing and networking skills were of less value than aggression and adrenalin.

The three floors occupied by Mason Jervis were all prime property, situated in the middle of the Bell End of the GBC and each virtually the size of a football pitch.

Jimmy’s pulse never failed to quicken as he emerged from the bank of lifts into the MJ reception area. This atrium stretched upwards through all three floors, the roof forming the floor of the business above. From where Jimmy stood, he could see not only MJ Floor 1 spread out before him but also, if he looked up, the balconies of MJ2 and MJ3, to get to which you needed to enter a separate internal lift. It was awe-inspiring. And all this hung sixty floors into the sky in a massive, bendy penis-shaped building that housed some twenty or thirty similar chapels to the financial sector.

What man could fail to be thrilled?

Jimmy headed up the Hungarian desk on MJ2. He was therefore in charge of all Mason Jervis’s dealings with the burgeoning Hungarian futures market. Every day his guys placed thousands of multi-million-dollar bets on the next projected half-decade of the Hungarian economy.

A great cheer went up as Jimmy approached the forty desks that occupied his space. His corner of MJ2. His stake in the Great Big Cock.

Jimmy punched the air as he strode towards his guys. A bet had come good, some intricate packaging of as yet ungrown or unmade products had gone the way that the team were planning it should.

Probably a short.

Most likely the value of some small part of Hungary’s future industrial or agricultural output had dropped in value, meaning that the package which Jimmy’s guys had sold (in order to force the price down) could now be purchased back at a lower price, yielding a profit in the difference.

Brilliant.

Jimmy hadn’t come up with the idea himself. Nobody knew who that anonymous genius was, but shorting had swept the financial world like a bushfire. It was so much easier and more exciting to bet on failure. Investing in the hope of appreciation was a long-term business requiring patience, foresight and a genuine understanding of the product you were speculating in.

Fuck that. Who had time?

Life was too short not to short.

There was very little Jimmy and his guys could do to force the value of a product
up
. But forcing it
down
just took guts and a cool nerve.

Jimmy smiled. It was good to hear a cheer and see the guys punching the air as of old and high-fiving each other. Things had been a little lean of late. The damn credit-crunch thing which had started in the trailer parks of the American Midwest had gone global and the weaker European economies, of which Hungary was one, were beginning to creak a bit.

‘Dudes!’ Jimmy called out as he approached the desks. ‘Looking good! Wha’appen? Whassup?’

Smiling faces turned to him.

Jimmy was to ask himself afterwards if any of them had betrayed a flicker of nervousness. He thought that they probably had but he hadn’t noticed it at the time.

‘Good trade?’ he asked.

‘Big time, boss,’ said a guy called Caleb. ‘A sugar cane future, shorted and
sorted
!’

‘Nice one, geezah!’ Jimmy said, high-fiving his informant. ‘But I guess you mean sugar
beet
.’

‘Nah,
cane
, boss. Looks like it’s finally emerging out of the shadow of corn syrup.’

‘They don’t grow sugar cane in Hungary, dude.’ Jimmy smiled. ‘They grow sugar beet.’

Now he did notice something. The blokes were all smiling as usual but there was something rather fixed, perhaps even a little forced, about their expressions.

‘Yeah,’ said Caleb, ‘but Hungary’s on hold.’

‘Hungary’s
on hold
?’ said Jimmy, astonished.

‘The desk,’ Caleb hastened to reassure him, ‘not the country.’

‘How do you mean, the desk is on hold?’

‘It just is. From this morning. The Man came down to tell us. We’re not trading there any more. We’ve been seconded to the Caribbean under Marcus.’