Black Fridays by Michael Sears Read Free Book Online Page A

think it was the Chinese who had said that. I thought it was one of those made-up proverbs, too dependent upon irony to be real. But everyone on Wall Street trotted it out whenever the markets misbehaved. I’d used it myself, but not in the last decade or so.
    “Thank you for coming in on this. Forgive me if I come right to the point. This project has the potential to derail some very high-level negotiations. This cannot be allowed to happen. I need to know that there is nothing to this investigation. And I need it yesterday.”
    If that was another slap for taking more than a week to get started, he was going to have to hit a lot harder before I took any notice.
    “I’m here,” I said again.
    There were pictures on top of the cabinets in front of the window—Stockman with his wife and children. The wife was pretty, in that wholesome, blond, middle-American way. The two daughters looked like her clones—two or three years apart. But in every picture, the camera had been focused on Stockman. Either he was the center of the grouping, or the other three were staring at him in adoration. And all the shots were upper torso only, with Stockman’s head showing just a millimeter or so higher than his wife’s. He must have been standing on a box.
    “Brian Sanders,” he said, as though announcing the first slide at a PowerPoint presentation. “The Coast Guard has officially closed their investigation of the young man’s death. It was an accident. Unfortunate.”
    I wasn’t there to investigate a boating accident.
    “Would I have known the guy?”
    “I can’t imagine. Sanders came to us from B-school. His family is from the Midwest somewhere. Kansas City?” He said it like I might not have heard of it. “Obviously, the family is still reeling. As are we. All of us. He was a good trader. Popular. Well liked. He would have had a long and prosperous career here.”
    “So you knew him?” I asked.
    Stockman’s eyebrows shot up. “Me? No. I’m just repeating what his cohorts have said. It seems he was an unusual young man.”
    If he was both well liked and a good trader, he must have been unusual. Most young traders had to start their careers with enough arrogance to last multiple lifetimes. The market burned it out of them quickly. If they learned to roll with it, they stuck around. What they lost in arrogance, they made up for in skepticism. I don’t know that the trade-off made them any more attractive as human beings, but it did make them better at the job. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Nietzsche would have made a good trader.
    “Why now? I mean with all that’s going on in the markets, all the fallout from the mortgage mess—here we are four or five years down the road and they haven’t come up with more than a handful of indictments—they’ve got insider trading running rampant, there’s all this going on, so why has the SEC chosen this month to investigate some junior trader? Have they asked about any other traders?”
    “No. Their letter of intent mentions no other traders.”
    He was hedging.
    “But you suspect something,” I said.
    “My contact there—a friend, looking out for me—mentioned that this little fishing expedition of theirs could be expanded.”
    One rogue trader is rarely capable of bringing down a bank—Barings being a notable exception—but a conspiracy of traders could easily be a huge problem.
    “On the phone you mentioned that compliance had already been over this. Why bring me in?”
    “Our people found nothing that the SEC might care about. Sanders’ managers were shocked to hear he’s being investigated. But I need an outsider’s eyes for confirmation.”
    Shocked? I doubted that. Traders whip around millions of dollars a day—sometimes billions—trying to make a minuscule profit on 60 percent of their trades. It is never a “shock” to find that someone cut some corners. Traders front-run customers—buying for their own book and running up the price