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dark corners whispering secrets observed or gleaned firsthand—to serried ranks of MBAs in cubicles staring at computer screens with half their minds fixed on tonight’s blind date and where to eat in Georgetown. The same was happening on Wall Street, as it turned out, with the ascendancy of the “quants,” or quantitative analysts, and computer-driven mathematical formulas taking over from human judgment based on instinct, common sense, and experience with occasional lashings of fair dealing.
    As Mankoff is fond of pointing out, the mathematical fun and games that the Street’s quants revel in—these are people who show up at industry get-togethers wearing T-shirts that say “Algorithm Terrorist”—tend to be true and accurate in proportion to their initial utility. In other words, to the early bird fall whatever worms there may be. But then, once everyone starts using a certain formula, it gets absorbed into the problem it was devised to solve or elucidate and becomes a self-referential, back-looping integral part of the phenomenon it’s supposed to measure externally and objectively. Synecdoche turned inside out, you might call it. At least, that’s what I think happens. I think it’s what George Soros means by “reflexivity.”
    Under Mankoff’s leadership, STST has moved from strength to strength. The price of the stock has more than tripled—from around $60 when he took over to close to $200 at yesterday’s close. Three years from now, in 2010, people are saying the stock could sell at $500. Why not? To the world, for better or worse, STST represents Capitalism Triumphant.
    Now let’s move to what transpired at Three Guys this morning.
    I got to the restaurant precisely on time. With me, punctuality rules. Mankoff was already in his usual booth, tucked off to the left behind the front door, with an egg-white omelet, sausage, andtoast teed up in front of him. How he stays as skinny as he does is a mystery. I slid in across from him and ordered a macchiato (Three Guys is now
that
kind of coffee shop), grapefruit juice, and a dry English muffin, then looked at him expectantly.
    “Here’s the story,” he said. “Basically, I’m worried about the political and financial situation. Something needs to be done.”
    “And that something includes me, right?”
    He nodded.
    “So what do you have in mind?”
    “I want you to fix next year’s presidential election for me,” he said matter-of-factly.
    After I picked myself off the floor, he spelled out his game plan. He thinks there’s going to be a huge implosion in the financial markets sometime before the election. The portents are already there. Add this to the mess in Iraq, and the GOP’s dead. Whoever the Democratic candidate is—and at this point it looks like Hillary Clinton—will go after Wall Street the way FDR did in 1932: with a lynch-mob agenda calling for both prosecution and reform. There will be a hue and cry for a pushback of the deregulation that has made the past decade the fattest in the Street’s history. “Reregulation” will be the rallying cry.
    Mankoff has devised a scheme to sabotage any such effort. He wants me to execute it, using tradecraft I acquired during my time at the CIA. I said I’d need to think it over.
    I’ll explain all this in further detail, but right now I have to go to an old friend’s birthday dance at the Stuyvesant Club and when I get home I’m sure I won’t be in any shape or disposition to do the chapter-and-verse bit about Mankoff’s plan.
    Let me just close by saying that as I listened to Mankoff elucidate the whys and wherefores of his grand design I was reminded of a famous episode in the annals of Wall Street, starring J. Pierpont Morgan—who is to Wall Street what Babe Ruth is to Cooperstown—andTheodore Roosevelt, one of our most admired presidents. It occurred in 1902, when Morgan got crossways with Washington on some dubious financing scheme. He sent the following message to President