“Sure thing boss.”
I dumped them on the dock with their stuff and got back out to the river to get to the office as quickly as possible. In fact I wasn’t so late that I couldn’t duck in and see how things were going before picking up Jojo. Since I was already a little late, a little later wasn’t going to matter.
I paid the dockmaster at our building to give me a half hour and ran to the elevator. In my office the screens were on as always, and I sat down and started reading in a state of extreme interest. Because the thing about bubbles is that when they pop, they pop. The metaphor is extremely apt, because the speed of a bursting bubble is its salient aspect. There, and then not there. If you’ve got skin in the game when that happens, that skin is gone. Very important to get out before that happens.
So I did not want this particular bubble of submarine bonds playing off the IPPI to pop, as I didn’t quite have all my ducks in a row. Bubbles, skin, ducks, yes it was a morass of mixed metaphors, a veritable swamp one might say, adding another one to the ones already there, but this is what all the recomplications of the game have led to: it’s gotten so complex that it can’t be understood, so everyone resorts to stories from a simpler time. Part of my job was sorting through all the metaphors to see if I could grasp the real thing underneath them all, which was not exactly mathematical, thank God, but more a system, like a game. In the various inflows of information that my screens gave me, the system was revealed in parts (like jigsaw puzzle pieces, yes, but not) and that system in the end was not like anything but itself. A vast artificial intelligence, yes, but as to whether it was really intelligent, I think that too is another metaphor, like Gaia, or God. In fact no one is really home, so all the intelligence in this system, such as it was, was really in the people participating in it. Which meant there might not be very much intelligence there. And it was definitely massively fragmented. So, many fine or not-very-fine intelligences had in effect combined to make a team, but with no coherence and no way to get purchase on the situation. Schizophrenic but not crazy. Hive mind, but no mind. The stack, as in stacked emergent properties, but really stacked emergencies. Really best to think of it as a kind of game. Maybe. A game, or a system for gaming things.
Anyway, on this afternoon my screens showed things were fine. No crash in the last two hours. I would have thought the Chelsea wreck would have dragged the local IPPI down a little more. There had been a shiver, a shock wave resembling the little tsunami that had radiated from the collapsed building itself, but stop that; it was a drop of about 0.06 in the global IPPI, 2.1 in the New York regional. That was one indicator of how much New York still tended to stand for The City everywhere. But the Hong Kong exchange had taken in this news and damped the shudder, no doubt because buildings in Hong Kong were always melting and so they were used to it. So in less than a week the situation had gone through news of the collapse, negative reaction, and investment reuptake, and on it went without further fuss, trending upward as usual. I saw what it was: people didn’t want the bubble to burst. It would take far more than any one building or neighborhood, because too many people were still making money going long.
Just time for a sigh of relief, and a note to my friend Bao in Hong Kong to keep up the good work of giving me his take on trends there, and the closing of a couple of deals, and I could shut down and hustle over to Jojo’s office. At that point I was only forty-five minutes late, and only a little hyped up by all the day’s events.
“Sorry I’m late,” I began as I was allowed in and entered her office, and I could see by the look on her face that it was good I began that way. “Vlade requisitioned me as I was leaving the Met, we had to zip up to the Bronx and rescue those two little squeakers who saved the old man, it was their turn to be saved.” And I explained how they had managed to get Roberto stuck on the bottom of the south Bronx, with Stefan up in their boat holding his oxygen bottle and nothing else.
“Jesus,” Jojo said. “What were they doing up there?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Fooling around like they do.”
She gave me a look I couldn’t read, then started shutting down her screens and gathering stuff into her bag. “Okay I’m ready. Where do you want to go?”
“How about back to the bar where we met?”
“Sounds good.”
In my skeeter, the locus now of such fond memories of our glorious date in the harbor, I felt the buzz of things going well, and in that excitement I described in some detail my relief at the fact that the submarine market had withstood the shock of the Chelsea building going under. “I’ve got to get my short-on as big as I can before the crash hits, or else I won’t be able to take full advantage of how much will be crashing, it’s amazing when you add it all up. Now that the IPPI is over a hundred it’s like a psychological tipping point, I think everyone is thinking it will start to soar.”
“Do you think your index is fooling them about that?” she asked, looking around at the other boats on the canal.
“What, like I’m spoofing or something?”
“No, just that it’s been going up no matter what happens.”
“Yeah, well, confidence is one of the variables being factored in, so it’s more like people just want it to be going up.”
“Don’t you want that too? I mean, wouldn’t that mean things were getting better for people living there?”
“Prices going up? I’m not so sure. But I am sure there’s a huge collapse coming in the housing stock itself. All the improvements in tech won’t be enough to make up for that.”
“But the index keeps going up.”
“Because people want it to go up.”
She sighed. “Indexes are strange.”
“They are. But people like complex situations reduced to a single number.”
“Something to bet on.”
“Or a way to try to track rates of inflation. I mean, the Cost of Living Extremely Well Index? What’s that for?”
She grimaced. “That’s to laugh at how rich you are. Check off the yacht, the fur coat, the jet, the lawyer, the shrink, the kid at Harvard, whatever else is on the list.”
“It’s definitely more fun to look at than the Misery Index,” I said. This was a simple index, as befitting its subject: inflation plus unemployment. “You could add quite a few more variables to that one too, I guess.” Such as personal bankruptcies, divorces, food bank visits, suicides … It didn’t seem like listing these variables was a good idea at this moment. “Or maybe the Gini index, maybe that’s a kind of cross between the Cost of Living Extremely Well Index and the Misery Index. Or you could go the other way and check the Happiness Index.”
“Indexes,” she said dismissively.
“Well hey,” I said, feeling defensive. “Don’t you use any?”