The Crash, page 15
‘What do I do?’
‘What we always do. We need to do some digging. And you need to go to work.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Not maybe. Definitely. You’re only a fraction of the way through the biggest story of your life. And if someone’s trying to stop you, your best defence is to expose them first. Stop feeling anxious and sorry for yourself, and get out there.’
‘OK, Mum.’
I stand up and assess myself. I think I can move without throwing up. I walk toward the front door.
‘Attaboy,’ Jess encourages me. ‘But Gil, you can’t leave yet.’
‘Why not?’
‘You need to put your shoes and socks on.’
*
At lunchtime, I am pedalling down Scrubs Lane to Television Centre. The analgesics have worked their magic, I am fragile, but I am back on the mission. The A40 flyover looms. As I swing right into the straight-ahead lane that takes me under the bridge, a black cab driver beeps, gesticulates and shouts something that might have been ‘Love your work, Gil,’ but I suspect was less flattering. I mouth ‘Sorry’ and zip through the lights. The doughnut looms ahead.
As soon as I enter the bustling business and economics unit, I head to the long table where the assorted national producers and correspondents sit at their PCs scrolling through wires, arranging shoots and filling in tedious risk assessment forms. Emma has her hand over the mouthpiece of a landline handset, and is trying to have a discreet conversation. As I hover next to her, I hear the time-honoured ritual of a producer trying to placate an interviewee, who gave up several hours of his precious time yesterday to be filmed by one of my colleagues but who never made it into the final edit. Emma is using the tried and trusted ‘a big story broke late last night and we were ordered to make emergency cuts’ line, rather than the truer ‘you were incoherent and unusable’. She hangs up.
‘I literally hate this job,’ she says.
‘Don’t talk bollocks. You love it.’
‘Sometimes. Though if you’ve come to see me, I assume my day is about to get a lot more complicated.’
I stick out my bottom lip and put on a hurt face.
‘For fuck’s sake Gil, what do you want?’
‘I’m really keen to do some filming on Schon’s trading floor. Can you sort it?’
‘I can try the PR, but what do I tell him? You know how much they hate publicity. It’s incredibly hard to persuade them to do TV.’
‘Can you tell him we’re doing a piece for bulletins on credit derivatives, credit default swaps, all those insurance policies that underpin the triple-A ratings of collateralised debt obligations. We want to help our viewers understand the innovations that have made it cheaper for people to borrow, especially for mortgages.’
She gives me a disbelieving look.
‘Are we really doing that piece? Have bulletins told you they want it?’
‘Not yet. But obviously don’t tell him that.’
She puffs out her cheeks. ‘I hope you’re not trying to get me into trouble.’
‘Would I, Em? If we get inside, and we extract decent footage and interviews, we’ll definitely use them. The financial crisis is the only game in town, and the explosive growth in the use of these derivatives is associated with the extreme risks the banks have been taking. It’s part of the story of banks going bust. Even if we don’t use the footage immediately, it’ll get used. You’d be telling Schon the truth. Sort of. Trust me.’
‘A little voice tells me I am making a stupid mistake.’
‘If the PR is iffy about it, I’ll reassure him.’
An hour later, Schon’s PR, Dougie Pescod, rings me to double-check that I’m not planning to turn over Schon. ‘This is a film about the market, not about us?’ he asks in his Texan drawl. ‘Right?’
‘One hundred per cent. It’s about why credit derivatives have cut the cost of borrowing. It’s about financial innovation that has improved lives, especially for those on lower incomes.’ Please let him swallow my bullshit.
‘OK. Swing by tomorrow at eleven; I’ll warn the guys on the desk. And I’ll be with you every minute,’ he adds.
‘Magnificent. See you tomorrow.’
*
The following morning, I walk onto Schon’s vast trading floor, to be greeted with a whooping noise, and shouts of ‘It’s the Peckmeister!’ I squirm. This is embarrassing.
‘You’re a legend among the traders,’ says Pescod. ‘They love Peckonomics. I assume you know you’ve been moving markets with it.’
‘Shut up Dougie, his head’s big enough as it is,’ says Emma. She takes the tripod off her shoulder, which she has been carrying for Petra while also dragging the rigid case filled with lighting equipment, and hands it to me. ‘You can lug this, Peckmeister.’
We walk to the middle of the floor, so that Petra can film a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama of the twinkling, blinking lights of hundreds of trading screens, and the giant ticker that flashes share prices, bond prices, and breaking news in a frieze running all the way around. The rows and rows of desks are like ploughed furrows in a dystopian digital landscape, peopled mostly by white men, navy blue jackets off, tieless, white shirts, top buttons undone.
‘Do you have another floor where all the women traders work?’ Emma asks.
Pescod colours. ‘We know. It’s not a great look. We’re actively trying to recruit more women.’
Emma rolls her eyes. ‘I’m just messing with you. Can we interview a couple of the guys? Nothing terribly detailed or lengthy.’
‘I assumed you’d ask. Most of them prefer to stay anonymous, but I’ve found two or three who are up for it.’ Pescod introduces us to Didier, who is thirty-something, floppy brown hair, spectacles with rectangular black rims – perhaps an homage to the young Yves Saint Laurent. His English is fastidiously perfect, his faint French accent is a chic luxury.
Petra gives me the handheld mic that’s wired to her cumbersome on-the-shoulder camera. I switch into focused, broadcast interview mode. ‘Good to meet you, Didier. I understand you trade credit. Tell me about the state of the market.’
‘It’s crazy. So much volatility.’ He gives a lengthy explanation that involves phrases like ‘the widening spread between three-month LIBOR and Sonia’. I let him talk and talk, while Emma gives me her ‘this is unusable’ stare.
When he’s finished his discourse on the semiotics of the trading floor, I have another go.
‘That was really interesting, but perhaps a bit too complicated for some of our viewers. So can I put it another way. If you were telling your grandmother what’s going on, how would you put it?’
He tries his best. ‘Banks are increasingly charging considerably more to lend to other banks than the risk-free rate of borrowing.’
OK. If my grandma had been a hedge-fund manager she’d have understood every word. She wasn’t. She sold ladies’ suits in a shop in Jewish Stoke Newington. But I am able to translate Didier. He just told me banks are significantly increasing what they charge other banks who want to borrow from them. The reason this matters is that it implies there’s an open secret in the financial industry that many banks are in deep trouble, and that therefore interbank lending, as it’s called, has become a very risky business.
We do a couple more of these chats, so-called voxes, while I scan the room and work out how I can escape Pescod and seek out Muller. Pescod is all Texan homespun ‘y’all’ charm, but he’s keeping me on a short leash. It won’t be long before I’ll have used up all the traders brave enough to appear on television news. I need to escape now.
I turn to Pescod and, with faux embarrassment, say I’d like to use the men’s room – which I noticed was beyond the trading floor by the lifts.
Emma lifts her eyes to the ceiling. Petra is busy walking down the rows gathering shots for coverage, and I can see Pescod has been looking anxiously in her direction, in case there’s sensitive information on the monitors she’s filming, or something wholly inappropriate on a trader’s desk. As I hoped, he judges it’s more dangerous to leave her alone with a camera than let me go to the loos without him.
‘How do I get back in?’ I ask.
Pescod unclips his door pass from his belt and hands it to me. I walk briskly off the trading floor, craning back to check he isn’t observing me. He’s looking at the tiny review screen on Petra’s camera, reassuring himself she hasn’t filmed anything that could get him into trouble. Perfect.
I head for the stairs. I’ve been here before when I was at the FC, and I know Muller is on the floor above. What I can’t remember is whether Corporate Advisory, where he’s a senior managing director, has its own reception desk. Shit, it does. Behind a block-like, dark wood table sits an immaculately turned-out young woman – brunette hair in severe bun, crisp white silk blouse, manicured nails.
‘Can I help you?’ she says.
‘I wanted to have a quick word with Robin Muller.’
‘You’re Mr Peck, aren’t you?’
I give her what I hope is a winning smile. ‘That’s right.’
‘My mum loves you. When you’re on the news she always shouts for me to come and watch. We love the way you explain things.’
‘So lovely of you to say that. Thank you.’
She looks left and right, as if checking we’re not being observed. ‘I’m not supposed to do this,’ she murmurs, ‘but could you scribble her an autograph? Things haven’t been great for her recently. She’d be so pleased.’
‘I’d be delighted.’ She hands me a Schon compliments slip. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Doreen. “To Doreen”, please.’
I write: To Doreen. Thanks for being generous about my eccentric broadcasts. Best wishes, Gil.
‘She’ll be made up. Thanks so much.’
Doreen’s daughter then reverts to her role as gatekeeper for Schon’s masters of the universe, and scrolls down her screen.
‘The thing is, Mr Peck, there’s nothing here to say Mr Muller is expecting you. Should I call his PA?’
Shit. What do I say?
I begin to mutter something about how he’s an old friend, and could she ring him rather than the PA, when I hear the voice I encountered in the Chichele Junior Common Room more than twenty years earlier. At the time he was passionately arguing we should go on strike to force the college’s endowment fund to stop investing in apartheid South Africa. I’ve often wondered what happened to Muller’s conscience when he joined the world’s most opportunistic and ruthless investment bank, Schon. Maybe I will ask him at last.
He steps out of his office and pauses, holding the door open. As he glances around the reception area our eyes meet, but he wilfully refuses to acknowledge me. Instead, he turns away and focuses on the man walking into the corridor.
Chris Ravel.
‘Hi, Chris,’ I say, so loudly that Muller can’t possibly pretend I’m not there. ‘Did you enjoy the party?’
Muller’s gaze flits between us. ‘Of course, you two know each other.’
Ravel ignores him. ‘Classic Elliott party,’ he says. ‘If you wrote an algorithm to identify the most important people in the country, most of them would be on his guest list.’
I brace myself for him to comment on my inglorious drunken exit, but either he didn’t see it or he’s not interested. I think of the Rothko and the photograph, and Elliott’s wife in the upstairs bedroom. ‘Definitely classic Elliott.’
Ravel tries to detach himself from Muller and head for the lifts. But Muller reaches out and grabs his arm. Ravel freezes. He does not like being touched.
‘What are you doing, Robin?’
‘I have a family, young children.’ That is odd. If I didn’t know better I’d say Robin Muller is scared. In all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never known him show vulnerability. What’s eating him?
Ravel shakes him off. ‘Relax, Robin. There’s nothing they can do. They’re up to their necks.’
He winks at me, as if to a co-conspirator. But he’s given me the clue I need. I don’t know for sure whether Muller leaked NewGate’s desperate state to me on Ravel’s instructions, but I’m fairly certain neither of them will want me talking about it here, in front of the receptionist.
‘Robin,’ I say. ‘We need to chat. About that conversation we had, when you telephoned me, just the other day.’ I turn to Chris and speak slowly and clearly. ‘Chris, would you be able to join us for a few minutes? What I want to discuss is relevant to you too.’
Muller’s control freakery is to Olympic standards, and this is not how his morning was supposed to pan out. He is flustered, and there is an involuntary twitch in the corner of his mouth. The last thing he wants is to be interrogated by me in front of Ravel.
‘Don’t worry, Chris, Gil’s an old friend. You’re in a rush. I’ll brief you later,’ he says, jerkily. The practised charm and composure, that he had even at college, has evaporated. ‘Let’s go to my office, Gil. I have precisely five minutes.’
I transmit a victory smile to the receptionist as I follow Muller to a corner room, which is the size of a well-appointed London apartment. It looks directly on to the dome of St Paul’s. The view says everything about Schon: it has privileged access – the best view imaginable – even to a national treasure like Wren’s masterpiece.
No time to admire it: my five minutes have begun. ‘Why did you tell me about NewGate being in such trouble? Actually that’s a stupid question. You knew telling me would blow up Jackson’s takeover of NewGate. Why did you want to kill that deal? Surely Jackson’s a Schon client?’
Muller collapses into the chair behind the desk and snaps shut the screen on his laptop. ‘You are trespassing. I should get you thrown out.’
‘Jesus, Robin. Don’t be an arse. If you did get me thrown out, do you think I would keep quiet about it? Don’t you think your partners in New York would want to know why the BBC’s business editor risked his career to talk to you, what you might be hiding?’
He goes quiet. There’s an antique grandfather clock in the corner and its tick is an ultimatum.
‘Why did you blow up the MHH deal?’ I try again.
‘Bigger fish to fry.’
That again. Marilyn’s this is massive.
‘What fish?’
‘Don’t be so disingenuous. You know what I’m talking about. You mentioned in one of your blogs how the crash of NewGate’s website contributed to the run. You have the pieces. Join them up.’
Chris Ravel’s cold-eyed certainty at Elliott’s party comes back to me. Numbers can’t lie, Gil. NewGate was always going bust. There was nothing Marilyn or Jackson could do to stop it.
Did Ravel also confirm that he’d ordered Muller to leak the story to me? I can’t remember. Why did I drink so much?
‘You screwed Jackson so that Ravel could make a killing. But why?’
This is sort of a rhetorical question. Ravel’s trading flows and information are priceless for a bank like Schon. The occasional deal fee from Jackson isn’t in the same league.
‘As I said, you are capable of working all this out for yourself. But I wouldn’t lose sleep over it. You fucked up a very bad person.’
‘Jackson?’
Muller just looks at me, hands in trouser pockets, fiddling with what I assume is a set of keys. I’ve never known him nervous and wired like this. I bulldoze on. ‘Ravel went massively short on NewGate. You used me to force the price down. That’s market manipulation. I should report the two of you to the Financial Services Authority.’
‘I’m not sure that would be career enhancing for you. How would you explain your role in all this?’
‘I’m not implicated.’
‘Really?’ He’s stopped jangling his keys and is resting his hands on the desk. ‘If the regulators did contact me, I’d be obliged to say that you told me you’d been informed by hedge-fund contacts of yours that NewGate was in trouble, and you asked me about it. I refused to comment. Schon’s rules, everyone knows that. So the question would then be why you didn’t mention that your contacts – perhaps your friends – were shorting the stock when you put out your story?’
‘But none of that is true. You rang me. I had no idea about short sellers.’
‘Good luck with proving that. In the meantime, what do you think your BBC bosses would do? And now that you are so famous, or perhaps notorious, who else would give you a job?’
This is getting wild. Which never happens when Muller is involved. I’m missing something. Muller is not frightened of what I may do: I’m just an annoyance, a bit of a sideshow. There’s something else. Why did he tell Ravel about being worried for his family? Someone’s threatening him.
‘Has Jackson worked out what happened? Is he going to report you to the authorities? Or has he already? Did he shop you to Marilyn on the day of the run?’
The day Marilyn died.
‘Gil. You’re out of your depth. Walk away, while you can.’ Which was pretty much what Marilyn was telling me to do in her voicemail.
The BlackBerry hums against my thigh, the buzz so loud in the quiet of the office that Muller can’t miss it. He glares. ‘Answer it.’
It’s Emma. ‘Where are you, Gil? The PR is going mental.’
‘On my way down.’
I hang up and turn to Muller. ‘You are a cunt.’
Chapter 13
D
AYS PASS IN A FRENZY of blogs and broadcasts. The great Jenga tower that is the banking system seems about to topple over, wreaking heaven knows what harm to the rest of us. No one can be sure which block will next be removed from the tottering tower, which bank will be next to collapse. I have somehow become the commentator for the nation of this monstrous game, and I am struggling to be neutral, impartial – because the more I see, the more I know that the greed of bankers has imperilled us all, while regulators slept. Inevitably, because I am excited and under pressure, my OCD has kicked in with a vengeance. It’s been the same since I was twelve years old: I doubt the evidence of my senses, and indeed my memory, and engage in repetitive rituals of checking and double-checking that I’ve done something, such as switch off the oven or the hob.
