I inhaled slowly, collected my thoughts. “The reason Kyle is storming around here this morning is because I committed the firm to buy up an entire bond issue in Bangkok. And we have to pay for it within a month. And Kyle’s convinced we haven’t got the cash. So he’s screaming that it’s going to drive the firm into bankruptcy.”
“Is this from all the work I did for you a couple of months ago?”
“That’s right.”
“Are we? At risk of going bankrupt?”
“I’ve pre-sold a lot of the bonds in syndication.”
She bit her lip. “I haven’t told anyone else. In January I started the level-one securities course on Thursday nights.”
“Good for you.”
“You always made it sound so interesting when I was doing that work.” She quickly added, “We haven’t got to syndications. Only stocks.”
“Okay. If stock is ownership of a piece of equity in a company, a bond is an IOU from the company. I borrow ten dollars from you. I promise to pay you back at the end of the month. I promise to pay you a dollar in interest. I write you an IOU that says I will pay you eleven dollars at the end of the month.”
She brightly contributed a piece from her coursework. “But there’s also secondary trading in stocks and bonds.”
“Right. You can wait until the end of the month, present my IOU, and demand eleven dollars payment. Or you can sell the IOU to someone else in the middle of the month for ten and a half dollars, take the money, and run.”
“Which is an over-the-counter trade.”
“Exactly. The next phase in financial engineering, after trading, is syndication. In syndication, instead of selling the bonds after they’re issued, we’re the mandated agent and lead book-runner, and we pre-sell the bonds to syndication partners and other book-runners before they’re issued.”
Her eagerness faded. I had lost her in technical terms. And she was embarrassed to admit it. I kicked myself. I wanted to be generous. I wanted to reimburse her for the emotions I had covertly borrowed from her, and to try, however inadequately, to compensate her for the silence of unseen men who had dismissed her as unworthy of attention.
“That’s okay,” I assured her. “You ever had a yard sale?”
“Sure.”
“So suppose your neighbour was going to have a yard sale a week from now and you looked over into his back yard at all the stuff he was going to sell next week. And you thought it looked like a lot a valuable stuff. So you offered to buy the whole lot of it for five hundred dollars.”
“Okay.”
“Except you won’t pay him until next Saturday, until the actual day that he has scheduled for the yard sale. Okay?”
“If you say so.”
“Then you go and take pictures of everything in the yard. And all week you go around to all of your friends. You show them pictures of all of the yard sale stuff. And you sell them all the stuff from the pictures. So far so good?”
“So far.”
“Okay. Now next Saturday, all of your friends come over to your house and they pay you for everything. And all of the money they pay you adds up to six hundred dollars. And you turn around and walk over to your neighbour and you pay him the five hundred dollars you owe him for the stuff. Then you hand the stuff over to your friends who you’ve pre-sold it to.”
I noticed the twitch of irritation from my words in the mirror of her face. I sounded patronizing. In my seclusion, my faculty to touch others has been buried beyond reach. I rushed to wrap up by dropping my palms open. “Then, what are you left with? Even though all the stuff is gone and even though you paid five hundred dollars to your neighbour for the stuff? How much is your profit?”
“A hundred dollars.”
“That’s what pre-selling a bond issue in syndication is like. Right now I’m running around selling the bonds before they’re issued. And when it comes time to pay for the bonds, I’ll have all the money from the syndicate partners who’ve subscribed to them.”
“And you’ll have a profit?”
“Welcome to Dodge City where every two-bit stock salesman wants to become a financial syndications gunslinger.”
She dropped our eye contact, not knowing how to respond to slang that was familiar to me, foreign to her.
To compensate, I offered, “I’ll be glad to help you with your course any time you want.”
“Thank you. I’d appreciate that. Just don’t mention it, okay. The other girls will gossip if they think I’m trying to get ahead of them.”
She raised her eyes, hesitated.
“Does this,” I asked, “make you feel any better about going on vacation?”
“Is this what you’ll be doing when I’m on vacation?”
“Day and night.”
She twisted up from her chair, then lingered before leaving. “Mr. Smith?”
“Yeah.”
“Is this what you really do around here?”
I nodded. “Just like yard sales. Except the money has more zeros.”
My attempted levity did not register. Deflecting back off her poorly concealed doubt, my words settled heavily, like layers of sand being poured around my ankles.
“Don’t worry,” I tried to reassure her in rapidly spun syllables. “I’ve got a secret weapon that’s not available in yard sales.”
“What?”
“I’ve got Stanley Man.”
Puzzled, she scratched her wrist and quietly walked out. Leaving me saddened for having tried. Leaving me irritated that she has made me feel responsible for eroding her happiness.
Was there anyone left I had not in some way failed?
* * *
In my world, sometimes, progress was measured in proximity to power and consent rather than financial profit and loss.
In the final remnants of the afternoon, Kyle appeared in my office doorway – a concession of coming, unannounced and informally, several dozen feet down the corridor to me rather than summoning me back to his office to resume the morning’s arguing.
“Sit down,” I offered. Two steps backward when accusations boiled, one step forward when they simmered back down.
“How’re we doing? What’s the count?” Kyle inquired, dropping into a chair, his voice now deflated by a day laden with unabated apprehension.
I kept my shrug neutral. I had no emotional stamina for further confrontation. Any more, even the least confrontation stirred up a sickening feeling like anticipating the menace of a blindside blow.
“Like I said, Kyle, it’s still going to take a couple more hours until the sun comes up on the other side of the world. I’ll be here late talking to them. Like all last week. I’ll stay on it. And it’s not as if we have to make a deadline today. We’ve got three weeks. I built a couple of weeks extra margin into it.”
Kyle chewed at the inner pocket of his cheek. “I’m still worried as hell about the cash.”
“I’ll bring the commitments in.”
“From whom?”
“Bank of South Asia.”
“How?”
“Most of the negotiations are complete.”
“Will we have enough?”