A $50 million margin call? I'll short Wall Street.

Monday, March 10, 2008, 9:15 PM.

200 Broad Street, Lower Manhattan, Goldman Sachs headquarters.

On the fifty-first floor, in a confidential conference room without any windows, completely encased in bulletproof glass and soundproofing materials, the air pressure was so low it was suffocating.

Rolling Stone magazine once used extremely scathing language to describe Goldman Sachs as "a giant vampire squid wrapped around a human face, ruthlessly piercing its suckers into anything that smells of money."

And this conference room is the brain of this squid.

Goldman Sachs' Chief Risk Officer (CRO), Craig Smith, sat at the far end of the oval conference table. In his fifties, he resembled a precision calculator devoid of emotion.

On the screen in front of him was playing the impassioned "180 billion liquidity denial statement" delivered this morning by Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwarz.

"Smack."

Craig pressed the remote control, and the screen instantly went black, disappearing Schwarz's confident face.

He's lying.

Craig's voice was completely flat, as if he were stating a physical law.

Seated on either side of the conference table were heads and partners from several of Goldman Sachs' core business units. No one objected to Craig's conclusion.

"Labo Bank did not renew their $500 million overnight repurchase agreement last weekend. This is an extremely dangerous sign."

Craig placed his hands, folded, on the table.

"Europeans don't cut off an AAA-rated funding chain for no reason. Rabo's risk management model saw something we might have overlooked."

"But they do have 180 billion in cash on their books."

A senior executive in the fixed income department frowned slightly as he flipped through the report in his hand.

"So what?"

Craig gave him a cold look.

"On Wall Street, once confidence collapses, cash is just paper to be burned. $180 billion? Once a bank run begins, that amount of money can be drained in forty hours."

Craig stood up, walked to the whiteboard, and wrote three letters heavily with a black marker: BSC (Bear Stearns).

Then, he drew a huge red circle on the outside and marked it with a glaring cross.

"Gentlemen, Goldman Sachs is not here to do charity, nor is it here to be buried with us."

Craig turned around, his gaze sweeping over everyone present, and issued the most ruthless kill order this vampire squid had ever given:

"From this moment forward, Goldman Sachs will completely sever its credit exposure to Bear Stearns."

"First, notify the prime brokerage business department to immediately cease accepting any mortgage-backed securities (MBS) or collateralized debt obligations (CDO) issued by Bear Stearns as trading margin."

"Second, notify the global derivatives trading desk to cease processing all credit derivatives swaps with Bear Stearns as the counterparty. If our clients' counterparties are Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs will no longer provide any guarantees!"

A soft gasp of cold air rose in the conference room.

Even these Wall Street tycoons, who were used to bloodshed and brutality, were shocked by the cruelty of this order.

In the complex world of over-the-counter derivatives trading, "Novation" is the foundation of mutual trust among investment banks.

Goldman Sachs' refusal to accept Bear Stearns as a counterparty was tantamount to publicly labeling Bear Stearns as "dead and bankrupt" in front of the entire Wall Street.

This is not stabbing someone in the back.

They kicked Bear Stearns straight into the morgue and then locked the door from the outside.

"Craig, if we do this, and the news leaks into the market..."

One of the managers hesitated before speaking.

"So what if it's leaked? Are you going to wait until Bear Stearns' corpse completely rots and Goldman Sachs gets infected with the plague?"

Craig pressed the communicator on the table without expression:

"The Compliance Department shall designate the above instructions as a red-level memorandum (the highest priority) and distribute it via the encrypted intranet to all relevant trading desk managers and risk control personnel worldwide. Execute immediately."

This was a silent execution.

There was no smoke of gunpowder, no reporters, only cold data and disconnected internet cables.

……

9:45 PM.

Floor 43, the risk control area of ​​the structured products department.

Emilia Walker was about to close her ThinkPad laptop and leave work.

Suddenly, a glaring red pop-up appeared in the lower right corner of the computer screen.

[System Level: Top Secret (Accessible only to VPs and Risk Control Managers)]

Emilia paused for a moment, then immediately entered her dynamic password and fingerprint verification.

A short, cold memo unfolds on the screen.

As her gaze swept over the two lines about "complete cessation of accepting Bear Stearns collateral and credit replacements," she felt an extremely strong chill run up her spine.

"My God..."

Emilia covered her mouth tightly to keep herself from screaming.

As a risk control expert who graduated from the mathematics department of MIT, she knew better than anyone the value of this memo.

Goldman Sachs's brain had already decided that Bear Stearns was doomed and was frantically running to the lifeboats.

But what truly terrified her was not Bear Stearns' life or death.

Instead, it was her boss—Richard Kleiman.

Just a week ago, Richard defied all opposition, even yelling at her, and forcefully accepted the $512 million "naked put option" from that Chinese guy named Lu Ze.

Richard was betting that Bear Stearns wouldn't die.

Moreover, Emilia also vaguely sensed that Richard had been privately trying to "stabilize" Bear Stearns' reputation in recent days, even using his personal network of connections to appease investors.

A Goldman Sachs vice president, for his own personal gain of millions of dollars in stock options, is going against the entire Goldman Sachs group's macro short-selling strategy and is running naked under the table!

Emilia's breathing became rapid.

The risk control personnel's instincts were screaming alarm bells in her mind: the Titanic had already hit an iceberg, and Richard was not only locked in the lower deck, but he would also drag the entire risk control team down with him!

Once the higher-ups investigate, Richard will definitely pin the blame for "lax review" on himself.

"I can't just wait to die... I absolutely cannot go to jail for that madman!"

Emilia's eyes instantly shifted from terror to utter resolve.

She glanced at Richard's vice president's office, which was already dark, to make sure no one was around.

She sat down again and her hands flew across the keyboard.

Using her top-level system privileges as a senior risk control executive, she accessed the old server archives that Richard had ordered to be "buried."

She found the real monitoring report on the underlying assets of the CDO, which showed a default rate as high as 14.2%;

The altered logs showing Richard falsifying 80 million in net assets of Farstar Capital (Lu Ze) were found.

They found the electronic signature record of Richard bypassing the risk control committee and forcibly approving the 50x leveraged over-the-counter transaction.

She took a black, encrypted USB drive without any markings out of her bag and plugged it into the computer's USB port.

The progress bar began to move slowly but steadily.

10%……45%……85%……100%.

With a soft "beep," the copying was complete.

Emilia unplugged the USB drive, quickly stuffed it into her inner pocket, and then completely erased any trace of her previous access.

She picked up her bag and walked quickly toward the elevator.

The Goldman Sachs corridor was still brightly lit, the cold white light shining on the carpet, as quiet as a huge mausoleum.