For example, after the Fed Chairman announces a rate change, there is always a five minute period where the US and world stock market spikes or troughs. So lets say for example, you have a £1 up bet on the Dow Jones Industrial Index. If you correctly guess that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is going to announce some positive news and then he does, then you’ll collect £1 for every point the index moves up. On the other hand, if your guess is wrong, then you’ll lose £1 for every point the Dow drops.
On 9/11, after a plane hit the first tower a brief news item appeared on Cantor’s news service about it. World markets rolled slowly over like a school of whales that hadn’t realized that each one had been hit by its own very lethel harpoon. I called up my broker, Fiona, with the gorgeous voice. “What’s happening?” I asked. “An airplane crashed the World trade Center,” she replied. “We have offices there. There has been some smoke coming up so they’re going to evacuate.”
When the second jet hit, it was apparent what had transpired. America was under attack. World stock markets crashed. The Italian Index dropped 2,000 points in a period of seconds. I rang Fiona back. “Our traders in New York say they can’t get out from the upper floors,” she said. “They’re going to the roof.”
For every point the MIB dropped, I made £2. I was now £5,000 to the good. Furthermore, the very people who would have to pay me where Canter Fitzgerald. I would making money from the very people dying in the attack. The more they died, the more money I would make. One of the few gentleman in this industry of feral opportunists is a fellow named David Buick, who worked in Cantor's London office as chief analyst, and who pops up on TV now and again. He often laced his blog with poetry or literary references. His only entry over the following days was a poem, from Binyon:
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.
I had been emailing a friend in America all that morning. This friend worked with certain TLAs--three letter agencies, and was trying to recruit me, although I didn’t see it at the time. “Someone ran a plane into the World Trade Center,” I wrote with the brevity and bluff these guys used on email. “Pentagon too,” he replied.
Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.
I had been emailing a friend in America all that morning. This friend worked with certain TLAs--three letter agencies, and was trying to recruit me, although I didn’t see it at the time. “Someone ran a plane into the World Trade Center,” I wrote with the brevity and bluff these guys used on email. “Pentagon too,” he replied.
Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midsts of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.
The BBC reported that people were running from the Capitol building, as it lay directly in the path of a commandeered jet. Later they would note that the jet had been shot down by American jet fighters over Western Pennsylvania. My mother lived close by, just over the Chestnut ridge along Route 30 in Latrobe. Her favorite restaurant for crabs, Herb's Old Tavern, was just up the road from the crash site in Jennerstown. "The civil air patrol won't let us leave our houses," she said. But she was alive, which was good news.
In later years, after she passed, and things began to go skew whiff between me and Big Brother, I would stop her grave while visiting from overseas. She was buried in a yard behind St. Vincent's, where the worthy of the area are laid to rest. I was always tailed by young government agents.
They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.
I've never been especially good at making money, but my ideas are sound. Furthermore, I was out of shape and too past it to join any of the traditional intelligence agencies. Not to mention that I liked a drink and had done far too many drugs in my youth, and enjoyed every minute of it. But there was nobody else with exactly my unique abilities. And I realized that our civilization was under threat and it could well collapse, unless me and others like me stood up and did something about it.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
It was a capitalist’s dream. True, it was obscene, but Cantor would most certainly have stuck it to me if I was the one dying up there in the smoke of the flawless blue. Stockbrokers and traders in general, as a class, are thugs. Cantor in particular would later be shown up for this, with the London office getting successfully sued for a prank in which officemates tried to force a Jew to wear a Nazi uniform for the crime of being late for work.
The smart money was down, but I just couldn’t do it. I closed my bet on the MIB after the second plane hit. I lost the profits I had made and then some in that idiotic “patriotic rally” that occurred after markets opened the following Tuesday. And the Milano Interbank index, which stood at 32,000 points on September 10, 2001, sank like a endurance diver off of La Spezia. Had I stuck to my bet I would have made £32,000 ($50K). Instead I ended up losing a few hundred bucks. Even now, when I rummage through the couch cushions to find money for gas, I can find comfort in the knowledge that I would never go back and change that moment.
They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the daytime;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.
Later that day Howard Lutnick would go on TV and burble that the company didn’t have any money. Everybody in the London office gasped and stood around screaming at the television as he spoke: “Shut the fuck up, Howard.” A run on their company was now inevitable, in addition to it having lost a lot of personnel.
But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;
I still owned my soul, but had nothing in my pockets. That was true then, and has been true throughout my life since 9/11. I was lukewarm to previous advances from the intelligence community, but it was that morning, at that moment, that I volunteered to work in the intelligence business. This decision would cost me a decade of my life and innumerable troubles, yet I don't regret it. I was in and that was that.
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain:
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.
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