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

On Wednesday afternoon, the air in a high-end coffee shop in Lower Manhattan was filled with the bitter aroma of freshly ground espresso.

Normally, this is a social space where fund managers and sell-side analysts exchange information. But today, a few seats in the corner are shrouded in an undisguised sense of anxiety.

Isabella Chan sat by the window.

She was wearing a dark gray business suit and holding a cup of black coffee that she had only taken a sip of. In front of her was a black leather notebook, and next to her was a thick stack of resumes.

At this moment, sitting opposite her was a white man in his early forties.

His name is Matthew Griffin.

Just a week ago, he was the Senior Vice President (SVP) of Fixed Income at Bear Stearns, earning over two million dollars a year with bonuses. He owned a villa with a pool in the Hamptons and his two children attended the most expensive private school on Long Island.

But now, although his suit was still pressed neatly, the bloodshot eyes and the tiny wrinkle on his tie betrayed the fact that he had not slept well for several days.

After taking over Bear Stearns, JPMorgan Chase ruthlessly laid off 80% of his entire department. Mortgage, car loan, and private school bills hung like three guillotines over his head.

"Mr. Griffin."

Isabella flipped through his resume and glanced at it.

"You spent twelve years at Bear Stearns. Your main responsibility was the structured design and sale of mortgage-backed securities, right?"

"Yes, Miss Chen."

Matthew tried to make his voice sound confident, but in front of this unusually young Asian woman who held the power of life and death, his back unconsciously hunched slightly.

"I have an extremely rich network and extensive experience in this area. If your company, Farstar Capital, plans to expand its fixed income business, I can..."

"Yuanxing currently has no interest in MBS (mortgage-backed securities)."

Isabella interrupted him. She didn't even use the word "please."

Matthew's expression stiffened for a moment, but he didn't dare to show it, only managing a dry laugh: "Of course, in the current market environment, caution is the right thing to do. So, regarding commodities or macro hedging..."

Isabella didn't reply; she just kept her head down, her fingers tapping lightly on the resume.

"Mr. Griffin." Isabella suddenly looked up, her beautiful eyes filled with an extremely professional indifference.

Two years ago, when I graduated from Wharton, I submitted an internship application to your department.

Matthew was stunned.

His mind raced, trying to find the woman in front of him among the countless Asian faces he had passed over in the past twelve years, but to no avail.

Every day, his desk is piled high with resumes from Ivy League schools, but he usually only looks at the first page. The chances of a non-white man getting into his core sales team are practically zero.

"Ah...is that so?"

Matthew's forehead began to bead with sweat. "I'm very sorry, Ms. Chen, the HR screening process at the time might have been..."

No need to apologize.

Isabella looked at him calmly.

"I was really eager for that opportunity. I even stayed up all night before the interview to study the underlying packages of the three CDO products that your department was promoting. But what I ended up receiving was an automated rejection letter."

"I later heard that the position was given to a Princeton graduate whose father was a senator from Connecticut."

Matthew's face instantly turned extremely ugly. He sat there awkwardly, like a ball whose fig leaf had been punctured.

He had thought it was an interview, but now he realized it might be a public execution.

"Ms. Chen, if you're angry about something that happened two years ago, I can explain..."

"I'm not angry."

Isabella closed his resume and pushed the original back.

"I just want to tell you, Mr. Griffin. Two years ago, you thought I wasn't qualified to sit at your trading desk. Today, I've seen your resume."

She looked directly at this once unapproachable Wall Street elite, her tone devoid of sarcasm, but conveying an objectivity more despairing than mockery:

"Twelve years. You were comfortably earning high commissions in a Ponzi scheme that was destined to collapse, yet you never once seriously questioned the risks. When the building crumbled, you not only failed to mitigate the company's losses, but you also failed to make arrangements for your own escape route."

"What Farstar Capital needs are hunting dogs that can smell blood, not domestic dogs that are used to being fed and don't know where to find bones once they lose their owners."

Isabella picked up her coffee and made a very clear gesture to send her off.

"Your resume does not meet our requirements. We wish you good luck at Morgan Stanley or Lehman Brothers."

Matthew Griffin's face flushed red. He opened his mouth as if to lash out, but faced with Farstar Capital's now infamous reputation on Wall Street, he ultimately dared not say anything.

He grabbed his resume somewhat awkwardly, stood up, and quickly walked out of the coffee shop.

Watching his departing figure, Isabella let out a soft breath.

There was no ecstatic joy of revenge as I had imagined, only a refreshing feeling of having swept away the dust that had accumulated in my heart for two years.

Lu Ze is right.

Power is the best antidepressant in the world.

She glanced at her watch and nodded slightly to the headhunter standing not far away: "Next."

……

Ten minutes later, an Asian youth wearing an ill-fitting suit that was clearly a discounted item sat down somewhat awkwardly across from Isabella.

"Hello, Ms. Chen."

The other person's English was fluent, but it still carried very subtle traces of being honed under Chinese education.

Isabella glanced at his resume.

Lin Tao. 27 years old.

Undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Tsinghua University, Master's degree in Financial Engineering from Columbia University.

Former general analyst at Bear Stearns derivatives trading desk.

This is almost a perfect resume that fits the "Asian stereotype on Wall Street": excellent in math, graduated from a prestigious university, doing the most demanding and mentally taxing quantitative accounting work, receiving the lowest bonus in the department, and never getting promoted.

On Wall Street, white people are responsible for socializing, sales, and decision-making; Indians band together to climb to middle and senior management positions; while Chinese are usually locked in front of supercomputers in the background, serving as the highest-paid senior coders.

"Mr. Lin."

Isabella got to the point, "Looking at your resume, you spent three years at Bear Stearns. Your main responsibilities were maintaining the options pricing model and analyzing micro-market data."

"Yes."

Lin Tao pushed up his glasses. His eyes looked tired, but they also revealed a kind of focus unique to science students.

Who was your boss back then?

"Daniel Weber".

Isabella raised an eyebrow. She knew this man; he was a notoriously short-tempered VP in the industry, and extremely fond of stealing credit from his subordinates.

What happened at the trading desk you were in charge of during the week before Bear Stearns collapsed?

Isabella looked at him and asked a rather pointed question.

Lin Tao paused for a moment.

A clear hint of resistance and pain flashed in his eyes, but he knew that on this cruel interview table, he had no right to hold back.

"collapse."

Lin Tao spoke, his voice deep, "I've been monitoring the liquidity monitoring model. On Wednesday, the model started issuing warnings. The proportion of collateral being rejected in the repo market is soaring, and the margin gap is widening every hour."

"I submitted the report to Weber. I told him that if three billion in liquidity couldn't be replenished within an hour, the trading floor's clearing system would crash."

"What did he say?" Isabella asked.

He threw the report in the trash.

Lin Tao gave a wry smile.

"He called me a Chinese nerd who only knows numbers. He said the higher-ups had already talked to the Fed and that $180 billion in cash reserves would be enough to get through this. He told me to shut up and keep defending that damn pricing model."

"and then?"

"Then, on Friday morning, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley cut off our credit access directly."

Lin Tao clenched his fist slightly, his knuckles turning white.

"The entire trading desk turned into hell. Weber was frantically making phone calls, begging for help, and smashing his keyboard like a madman. And I was sitting in front of the screen, watching helplessly as the hedging models I had spent three years writing turned into a pile of useless code because of the lack of liquidity."

He raised his head and looked directly at Isabella:

"It feels like...you clearly see a tsunami, but the blind man at the helm insists on crashing the ship into the rocks. And you, because of your skin color and rank, don't even have the right to grab the steering wheel."

Isabella listened quietly.

In Lin Tao, she saw countless versions of herself struggling at the bottom of Wall Street, as well as countless intelligent Asian elites crushed by arrogance.

"If you were in the steering wheel at that moment, what would you have done?"

Isabella asked.

Lin Tao answered without hesitation: "On Wednesday morning, we'll liquidate all non-core OTC derivatives positions regardless of cost, even if it means a 30% loss, to get back our absolute cash reserves. Then, we'll buy high-grade government bonds for overnight repurchase as quickly as possible. Survival, even if it's just losing a leg, is better than the whole ship sinking."

This is an extremely cold-blooded, decisive, and even somewhat extreme stop-loss strategy.

But it was precisely the decision that those high-ranking white executives, due to their greed and stubbornness, were unable to make.

Isabella put a checkmark on Lin Tao's resume.

"Lin Tao".

Isabella closed the folder, leaned forward slightly, and exuded the imposing aura befitting the COO of Farstar Capital.

"Yuanxing Capital does not offer the false 'diversification' protection found in those big banks. We do not offer free coffee and afternoon tea, nor do we have seniority-based promotion channels."

"At Farstar, only one thing determines how much money you can make: your ability to execute in the market and your sense of risk."

She looked at Lin Tao's somewhat surprised eyes.

"You're hired. Three-month probation period. Base salary is 30% higher than what you earned at Bear Stearns."

Lin Tao was stunned.

He didn't expect the interview to end so quickly, and even in this desperate season of layoffs, the other party actually gave him a raise in his base salary.

“If,” Isabella paused, her tone turning icy, “you can prove that what you see in the model is just as accurate in real trading, then by the end of the year you’ll realize that all the humiliation you endured at Bear Stearns over the past three years was nothing.”

"Tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM, 270 Park Avenue. Go to the front desk to pick up your employee ID."

Lin Tao took a deep breath and stood up abruptly, almost tipping over his chair with the force of the movement.

"Thank you, Ms. Chen. I won't let you down."