Dark days for Ireland, and Greece, and almost everybody else; but at BOT the good times continue to roll. The market has responded positively to our quixotic takeover bid for Agron; the American bank’s board of directors is reportedly receptive, as, no doubt, a beached whale would be receptive to being put back in the sea; an underwriter has been found, and Porter Blankly’s old friend the Caliph has offered BOT a line of credit to the tune of several billion.
‘I still don’t understand how this is supposed to work,’ Ish says. ‘Agron is huge. We’re small. If we borrow all this money to buy it — won’t we be over-leveraged? Like, massively?’
‘This is in fact the whole point,’ Jurgen says. ‘Porter’s strategy is to distribute BOT’s connections so widely across the global marketplace that we become systemically necessary, that is, too big to fail.’
‘So they can’t let us go down, because then all of the people we’ve borrowed from would be pulled down with us,’ Kevin glosses.
Ish still seems unconvinced. ‘It sounds like putting on a suicide belt so that no one will bump into you on the subway.’
‘That is quite a good comparison,’ Jurgen agrees. ‘We are hoping BOT’s high market standing will persuade the other subway riders to fund a particularly large and explosive suicide belt.’
To ensure a quick turnaround, the deal will be done here in Dublin, where at least some of the extraordinarily complicated legal requirements can be brushed under the carpet. Corporate has been assigned extra offices in a building in the neighbouring block; extra staff are being flown in from New York.
On the ninth floor of Transaction House, meanwhile, where until a few months ago a property company had its offices, new doors with code-locks are being hung, expensive new desks and chairs delivered, thrillingly white new whiteboards fitted to the walls. Details are scant as yet, but it is believed that the activity has to do with Porter’s other prong: to take BOT deeper into the abstract, developing new financial instruments that will ensure profits no matter what is happening in the so-called real world. Howie’s name is on the door of the corner office; he is taking Grisha with him, and a hand-picked team of junior analysts.
‘Those guys are going way out.’ Kevin is seeking to alleviate the heartbreak of being passed over for the team by acting as a kind of ninth-floor John the Baptist, making sonorous prophecies about their work whenever the opportunity arises. ‘Waaaay out.’
‘But what are they actually doing?’ Gary McCrum asks.
Kevin shakes his head. ‘All I know is that there’s some heavy fucking maths involved.’
‘I heard Porter was giving them a hedge fund,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says.
‘I heard that too.’
‘I heard it was a hedge fund, only more counterintuitive.’
‘That’s one thing you can count on.’ Kevin slings his foot over his knee and swivels in his chair. ‘Whatever it is, it’ll be majorly counterintuitive.’
‘And is Rachael involved in it too?’
‘Rachael,’ Kevin snorts.
When we are alone, Ish tells me that Howie asked her to be on his team.
‘What? Why didn’t you mention this before? What did you say?’
She doesn’t reply for a moment; a sudden blast of sun through the venetian blind throws tiger-stripes of shadow across her face. ‘I said no.’
‘No?’ I am confused: in our world, when an opportunity is presented, you take it. ‘I don’t expect you to make the slog here for ever. Howie is the growing star. He will bring you with him.’
Ish shrugs, sips from her water bottle. ‘Maybe I’m happy enough making the slog,’ she says. ‘Anyway, it sounds like cobblers.’
‘Did he tell you what they were doing?’
‘Some sort of a fund all right. He said it was going to transform Western civilization. But it’s Howie, Claude. He’s a bullshit artist.’
‘Porter doesn’t think he’s a bullshit artist. Kevin told me New York’s started bringing him in on strategy meetings.’
‘That bloke’s never had a strategy in his life that didn’t involve putting his dick up some poor unwitting bastard’s arsehole.’
‘Well, in their eyes he is a genius.’
‘Yeah,’ Ish says disconsolately. ‘Who knows, maybe he is.’ She turns back to her terminal. ‘Bend over, world. Here comes another genius.’
The Financial Times posts an article by a former head of the German Bundesbank about the future of the euro. He likens the currency’s situation to that of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan. There, the fairy is brought back to life when all the children in the world who believe in magic clap in unison. ‘In Germany, however, the public and politicians are determinedly sitting on their hands. It is not that they do not believe in magic; rather, they do not believe the other, naughty children should benefit from that magic. They would rather the fairy die, and teach the other children a lesson. Therefore it is not a sentimental judgement to say that the currency may die from a want of love.’
The naughty children in this case being Greece. While the protestors fulminate fruitlessly through the streets, the country’s future is being rewritten by the IMF.
‘What are they going to do?’
‘Sell off national resources. Cut services. I’d guess most public sector workers will be fired. Pensions will be gone, taxes will double, and so on. Until the books are balanced again.’
‘Meaning, until the Germans get their money back,’ Ish says sardonically.
‘The Greeks got huge development grants from the European Union,’ Jurgen insists. ‘Many billions of euros, which they used to build swimming pools on their roofs and have a ten-year tax holiday.’
‘How did they persuade anyone to give them anything?’ Kevin asks. ‘If their economy’s so batshit crazy?’
‘Porter Blankly,’ Ish says. Kevin looks quizzical. ‘The Greek government paid Blankly’s old bank Danforth Blaue three hundred million dollars to fiddle the accounts and shift their debts out of sight,’ she explains. ‘So on paper they looked legit.’
‘That was legal?’
‘Danforth got their money,’ Ish says with a shrug.
‘The EU are big boys,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says. ‘If Danforth cooked the books they should have spotted that for themselves.’
‘Didn’t the head of the EU also use to work for Danforth?’ I remember.
Wheels within wheels; but it’s not our place to make moral judgements, only to forecast where this information will drive the market. Right now it resembles an enormous, international game of keep-away, with money taking flight from any company that so much as booked a junket to that side of the Mediterranean. But there is plenty of scope for things to get worse. A bet against togetherness is never a bad option, financially speaking.
I come out of a meeting on Grand Canal Dock that afternoon to see I have missed a call from Paul; after a certain amount of debate with myself, I call him back.
The phone is answered by a high voice. ‘Pinaco Sooshin?’ it says.
‘Excuse me?’ I say.
‘What?’ says the voice.
I realize I recognize it — ‘Remington?’
The response is a loud thudding in my ear; then in the background I hear Paul’s voice say, ‘Don’t just throw it on the floor, Remington, Jesus,’ and Remington’s squeaky apology.
‘What is Pinnacle Solutions?’ I say when Paul picks up the phone.
‘Our conversation the other day got me thinking,’ he says. ‘Maybe we gave up on Hotwaitress too easily. I talked to Igor and we decided we’d put a few feelers out, see if it was worth having another try.’