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

Inside the trading hall of Farstar Capital, the atmosphere was roughly the same as, or even more lively than, that of the lively onlookers outside.

Lin Tao had six news windows open simultaneously on his Bloomberg terminal, with a new news flash popping up every few minutes.

The Ministry of Finance's statement is being dissected sentence by sentence by major media outlets, with commentators rushing to use impassioned phrases such as "a victory for the spirit of contract" and "Sarkozy's Waterloo."

Ben Kahn leaned back in his chair, coffee in hand, shook his head at the freshly released statement from Barek on the screen, and whispered something to Matt beside him. Matt smiled.

Alicia leaned out of her seat and asked, "Where's Deutsche Bank? Did they come with us?"

"Not yet." Lin Tao didn't turn his head. "The Germans might not be willing to back down, but I think they'll have to say something."

A rare, relaxed joy permeated the entire hall. This went far beyond making a lot of money; it was a deeper comfort, a feeling of being "on the winner's side."

Their boss issued a statement, then the US Treasury Department endorsed it, and then European banks started switching sides one by one.

The entire Wall Street, the entire United States, is cheering for Farstar Capital's statement.

The boss keeps winning.

However, the door to the office at the far end of the hall was ajar.

Occasionally, someone passing by the door would see Lu Ze sitting at the table. On the six screens in front of him, the Bloomberg terminal's news feed was still scrolling continuously, but his gaze didn't linger on any of the breaking news.

Several documents were spread out on the table. A pencil rested on the blank space of the top document. There were a few scribbled numbers on the paper, but the writing stopped halfway through.

His mind was racing, but the content of his thoughts had nothing to do with the noise outside.

This morning around 8 a.m., less than half an hour after the statement was pushed out by Bloomberg, Fleming called up from downstairs on the internal line.

The new COO of the aphelion seems to never get tired.

Lu Ze sometimes felt that Fleming had released all the energy he had accumulated during his last few months at Merrill Lynch when he was sidelined by Saine.

He was like an engine running at full power, simultaneously handling the fundraising process for the first fund, the collaboration with Morgan Stanley, talking to one team after another, and—the acquisition opportunities that were popping up in the market every day, being sold off cheaply because of the crisis.

Fleming's phone call that morning was brief. He first gave a simple update on the progress of all parties (for example, Qatar's legal team was very efficient and the terms list might be signed this week), and then changed the subject, mentioning something he had been looking at recently.

"Lance, if our structure includes a private equity (PE) component, I think there's another target worth considering from Lehman Brothers."

Lu Ze was reviewing a section of the private placement memorandum at the time, and simply grunted in response, indicating that he should continue.

Fleming said that while pursuing the acquisition of Lehman Brothers' previous commercial real estate team, he noticed that Lehman also had a private equity business. The team consisted of about twenty people, managed a number of projects, and several partners had good connections in the industry.

"If we act quickly,"

Fleming said, "It might take less than a quarter of its replacement cost to acquire the entire team and existing projects. Of course, there's likely a lot of competition. So if you think it's worth considering, I'd like to arrange an initial due diligence and initial contact as soon as possible."

Lu Ze's reply was only four words: "You decide."

Fleming said a couple more things about the time window, and then hung up.

That phone call happened three or four hours ago.

From then on, Lu Ze paid less attention to things like "whether Deutsche Bank would follow suit" or "how Sarkozy would react." His strategic objective had already been achieved.

He was thinking about a bigger problem that Fleming's words had raised, a problem that inevitably caused him some concern.

Lehman Brothers' PE.

If Yuanri Point were to acquire this business, how much would it cost? Considering liquidation discounts and team retention costs, it would likely be between fifty and eighty million US dollars. That's a small amount, not much.

But Lehman's PE was just a small fragment.

He certainly didn't build it slowly like Schwarzman built Blackstone, but rather devoured it like a gluttonous snake.

If he really intends to make Far East Point into the complete alternative asset management platform he envisions—one that covers multiple business lines including credit investment, distressed debt, private equity, real estate, and special opportunities—then Lehman's private equity is just a small piece of the puzzle.

He still needs a lot more.

Citigroup is planning a large-scale asset divestiture: it includes an entire credit team, decades of accumulated customer relationships, and an existing risk control and compliance framework. But Citigroup's assets won't be cheap.

AIG will have to slim down sooner or later.

The insurance giant that was taken over by the government was later broken up by the government because it was too bloated and needed to repay debts. Each of the broken-up companies is a leader in the industry.

However, the spin-off plan for AIG has not yet been officially launched and may not begin until 2009.

Besides these opportunities that have already surfaced, he knows that as the crisis continues to deepen in the coming months, more banks, insurance companies, and asset management firms will be forced to downsize and sell off their business lines and teams, which they have spent decades building, at rock-bottom prices.

The US financial market in 2009 and 2010 will become a huge, unprecedented asset flea market.

But that market window won't stay open forever.

Every vulture fund that smelled blood was watching closely. Coupled with Bernanke's massive quantitative easing, market liquidity quickly became abundant, and those half-dead institutions would regain their financial strength.

So the problem is clear: it would take several billion dollars to consume these fragments.

And by the end of the year, he will certainly have tens of billions of yuan in liquid funds.

However, Blackstone's assets under management exceeded one trillion US dollars in 2024.

Blackstone didn't start from scratch; by 2008 it was already a giant managing hundreds of billions of dollars.

It has decades of industry experience, Schwarzman's passport to any power office in the world, a team of thousands, and a global business network.

Apollo, KKR, Carlyle—each of them is of the same caliber.

They all went on a buying spree in the ruins of 2009, and they all multiplied the value of those assets they bought several times over during the Fed's massive quantitative easing.

And what does he have?

Fleming, a newly established avenue point, an unfinished fundraising document, and a pile of receivables still in other people's pockets.

After all, in his past life's memories, there wasn't a single new player who started from scratch in 2008 who successfully broke into the top circle in the following ten years or so.

Those giants of 2026 were already giants in 2008. They've just gotten bigger.

What he was going to do was something that had no precedent for success in his own memory.

He was unsure whether he could do it.

He had the answer to shorting subprime mortgages. He had the answer to shorting oil prices. He had the answer to when Lehman Brothers would collapse.

But whether a new platform starting from scratch can become equal to Blackstone within fifteen years—he certainly wasn't sure, because he had never done it before.

Meanwhile, the answer to another question was flashing in his mind with an almost torturous clarity.

He knew how much copper prices would rise in 2009.

He knew that crude oil would fall from over thirty dollars back to seventy or eighty dollars.

He knew that gold would surge toward $1,900 over the next few years. He knew the Federal Reserve would loosen monetary policy, that almost all assets that had been hammered down by the crisis would rebound under the impetus of liquidity, and he even remembered some unusually rapid rises in speculative stocks.

These numbers were etched in his mind, like rows of bright lights, so clear they were almost blinding.

Each number represents a highly certain profit that he can easily grasp.

What he's doing now is taking a portion of the money that could have been used to capture those profits and using it to buy "teams," "licenses," "middle and back-office systems," "compliance structures," etc. These things don't generate any transaction revenue in the short term and may even incur operating costs.

Five hundred million US dollars, if used to trade copper futures, could most likely turn into one billion or more in six months.

The same $500 million, if used to buy a credit team spun off from Citigroup, would still amount to $500 million six months later, plus a bunch of people still getting used to each other, an operational process that hasn't been fully implemented yet, and a monthly payroll bill.

The answer to this arithmetic problem is crystal clear.

From a purely investment return perspective, "trading" is always the better option. Always.

Moreover, this "forever" is not a one-time event. It extends to the entire year of 2009, the first half of 2010, and even longer.

"There are these kinds of 'guaranteed profit' deals everywhere."

For every sum of money he invests in the platform's development, there is a corresponding trading opportunity that he chooses to forgo.

Those opportunities that were missed will not disappear silently; they will remind him, with precision down to the decimal point, how much he missed out on.

Lu Ze put down his pencil and leaned back in his chair.

He stared at the two columns of numbers on the paper; on the left was the money in his hand, and on the right was the item he wanted to buy. He looked at it for a long time.

"We're still too poor. If only we had 300 billion right now."

He chuckled self-deprecatingly.