Thomas Hoover - The samurai strategy

Forget the "financial experts." They were reduced to spouting pure gibberish. Time to check in at the real front line. Sam Kline.

Maybe I just wanted to have Sam to soothe me like in the old days, pour some of that dreadful coffee he had in his Thermos, tug down the cuffs of his trousers, and say not to worry, there's always tomorrow, the disaster in my portfolio merely reflected a long-overdue and healthy "correction" in the market. (Only years later did I finally realize that "correction" was a special Wall Street expression meaning all the stocks you own just tanked.)

When Sam finally got around to my call, he was barely coherent but still trying.

"Matt, what's new?" There was turmoil and yelling behind him, as though the office was about to go under a wrecking ball.

"You tell me."

"Well, at the moment it's something of a downside morning, but-"

"Sam," I snapped, "this is me, Matt, save the Pollyanna."

A short pause, and then he crumbled. "Matthew, want the truth? The Monday Massacre of '87 was a rally compared to this. That crash was just stocks. This time it's U.S. bonds, the dollar, everything. The market's falling apart. Right this minute the trust departments at First Boston and Morgan are dumping entire sectors like they were some nervous greenhorn in Oshkosh. Pension fund managers I've known for years are liquidating whole blocks 'at the market,' for whatever they can get. One specialist downtown just told me he had to eat a hundred thousand shares of, Christ, General Dynamics. You can't give away Northrop. And Lockheed, forget it…" Another pause. "God Almighty, Matt, we need a market up here. How about-"

"Not now, Sam." It was like hanging up on my own father. A knife in my heart. "Look, I'll get back to you. Best to Naomi."

Good God. I wanted to hire an airplane and skywrite a big sign over downtown: WAIT. Trouble was, I wasn't sure myself what it was all about.

However, there was one thing I could do. I punched in the contact number for Dai Nippon, uptown, and told the polite little lady who answered the phone to get Tanaka on the line this goddam minute. About ten seconds later he was there.

"Are you guys nuts?" I yelled. "Doesn't anybody up there know what's happening?"

"We are well aware of the situation, Mr. Walton."

"Well, then, do something, for chrissake!"

"Our securities dealers here are in contact with the appropriate officials. Nothing is to be done without explicit instructions from Noda-san. He has not yet been in communication."

"Well, get him in communication."

"There is no cause for alarm, Mr. Walton." He continued calmly. "Noda-san has made sure that our dealers' exposure in Treasuries is covered by the futures contracts DNI has acquired. Japanese investors are sheltered from price fluctuations. Noda-san is most grateful for your-"

"Listen carefully," I said. "Fuck Noda."

I hung up.

The rest of the morning I just sat there and watched the market crater. After bond futures prices on the Chicago exchanges had sunk the daily limit, as far as they could drop in a single session, the action merely moved elsewhere. A cash market developed off-exchange worldwide and was going crazy, with spot quotes nose-diving. Prices now were only rumors, but the satellite services were still trying to track them. At exactly 12:37 P.M. the President finally got around to issuing an Executive Order suspending all trading at the exchanges in government bills, notes, and bonds, including futures contracts, until further notice. It turned out to have been about as effective as Prohibition. Besides, by that time I figured Noda had already cleared at least fifty billion.

Enough. I couldn't watch anymore. All of a sudden I felt like a guy who'd bailed out of his flaming F-16 only to see it total a schoolhouse. I kicked off the computer, slipped on a suede jacket, and headed for Bleecker Street to fortify myself with mussels marinara and a stiff Bloody Mary. The early Post at the corner newsstand proclaimed with characteristic understatement the imminent passing of the civilized world.

Over cappuccino I finally started to think rationally. Nothing anybody was saying added up to a full picture. There had to be more, or less, to the story…

Then the truth glimmered before my eyes, yet another transcendental moment. What Noda was planning was obvious. At last I realized why he'd hired me. Like a great chess player, he could see about ten moves ahead. The question now was no longer what his next move would be. It was when.

You want to win World War III with a quick blitzkrieg, knock America to its knees? Simple. Go for the blind side. First you short a piece of the debt market, then for fun you dump the currency in advance (since it's just naturally gonna go the way of the peso when you make your opening move, and you might as well squeeze the orange if it's just lying there anyway). Next you kick things off by giving everybody the impression you're divesting all Treasury paper, which causes the dollar to predictably plummet…

Christ! What about Amy's currency hedge! Three weeks ago I'd contracted to sell the banks of New York ten million dollars she didn't own. In all the pandemonium, I'd completely forgotten.

I threw down a twenty for the lunch and literally raced around the corner to look for a pay phone on MacDougal. When I finally found one that worked, I shoved in a quarter and dialed the FOREX desk at Citibank for a dollar quote.

Henderson was right. Paper money is predicated on trust. It seems that when the second largest industrial nation in the world apparently doesn't think enough of the credit rating of the first largest industrial nation in the world to loan it two cents, then talk about the full faith and credit of said first largest, etc., doesn't cut much ice. The Fed was out there buying dollars and dumping marks and yen and pounds in the billions to try and keep the dollar afloat, but nobody else in the Group of Five-those countries supposed to step in and buy each other's faltering currencies to prop them up-was lifting a finger. In spite of our treasury secretary yelling fire and damnation, all they'd done was announce an evening meeting in Paris. Period. What, they inquired, had the U.S. done lately to help out France, West Germany, Britain, or Japan?

Behind our allies' diplomatic and not-so-diplomatic posturing lay a simple, rhetorical question: Who needed passage on a sinking ship? At the moment the only thing governments around the world wanted less than U.S. Treasury debt was U.S. greenbacks. I'd contracted to swap ten million of them for other currencies back when they were worth a dollar. That afternoon I settled with bills worth eighty cents and sinking. That's right. Amy's college-fund hedge cleared two mil.

And if you think Miss Amy Walton survived the dollar's crash intact, what about Matsuo Noda, now holding tens and tens of billions in world currency forwards?

What didn't prosper that Monday was a state of mind called Wall Street. By mid-afternoon all the market indexes were down by half; exchange trading had been halted in a good two- thirds of the Dow stocks; a major brokerage house had frozen accounts and announced Chapter 11; and gold futures were soaring. The October crash of '87 was now a nostalgia item, remembered as a few sessions of light trading with a hint of downside bias.

A lot of investors went to cash, but most switched into money funds (what else could they do?). While sophisticated players were shorting the stock indexes and futures, the newsletter gurus-who charged two hundred dollars a year for hot tips about equal in worth to those of a New York cabbie-were calling their major clients. A big sell signal was emblazoned in the streets of lower Manhattan. Everybody assumed the situation was temporary, but nobody needed to ride the ship down. By the closing bell the Dow had sunk over eleven hundred and fifty points. And don't forget, the DJ Average represents blue chips; prices for over-the-counter outfits like Widget-tronics Inc. just packed up and headed south for the winter.