Everyone I talk to tells me the same thing about the current Wall Street drama: it’s a slow-motion train wreck, and it’s impossible to look away. And in the last few days it’s turned into a first-class, live action political blockbuster that came to an abrupt and unsatisfying denouement about half-way through and then played a teaser trailer for the sequel.
Me, I spilled my popcorn at the very beginning, when the $700 billion bailout figure — the digits set in my mind’s eye in a heavy Helvetica Bold — got my brain hopelessly spinning its little wheels, trying to divine just where such a number came from. In the end, I had constructed an elaborate scenario.
The camera zoomed out slowly to reveal Henry Paulson, played in my head by Morgan Freeman, addressing a small roomful of sharply-dressed men and women. “Desperation is in the air, ladies and gentlemen. The world’s largest economic superpower is wrestling with its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and we are calling on you for help. You are 100 of the best quantitative analysts, mathematicians and finance experts in the United States of America. You have access to all the data — the Fed, the failed banks, the banks still running. In three days, your president will announce a bailout package designed to dig us out of this mess. And your job is to tell him how much money it’ll take. You need to arrive at a number that can save us all.” Taking only a brief moment’s pause, Paulson finished: “the fate of our entire economy in the hands of a hundred men. My, my. Isn’t that something.”
The rest of the movie features frenzied number crunching, mind-boggling calculations, a mix of application and mathematical theory, countless simulations run by hundreds of thousands of computers on emergency loan from Google and Microsoft, and a side story where Cobie Smulders plays a brilliant but troubled mathematician who receives unlikely encouragement from bad-boy ex-Lehman financier (Colin Farrell) as the two fall recklessly in love. And after three days, the massive projection screen at the front of the room blips frantically for a while before freezing on a single number: $700,000,000,000. Ecstasy ensues, there are hugs and handshakes all-around, and Paulson rushes the number to the president, secure in the knowledge that if only such funds were procured, the smartest people and the smartest math in the world know it would end the crisis.
It was pretty great. Unfortunately, Forbes.com learned it wasn’t quite how things had played out:
In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy. “It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
I’m no Roger Ebert, but I’m pretty sure I like my movie better.
