"It's a sports car with no brakes, charging straight for a cliff."

Graph after graph of futures indicators, stocks and the currency markets scrolled across the monitors.

Even at this moment, the people I'd hired to trade in my place were raking in money.

In futures, stocks and exchange rates, they were on a winning streak that never broke.

The futures market, blind to the catastrophe about to hit, kept setting record prices.

Oil and every other raw material were climbing like crazy.

Like the grand finale of a festival.

"Everybody's red-hot..."

The graphs projected the greed of people racing toward a crash that had already been foretold.

Anyone could see it was a gambling den, but they dove in like moths to a flame.

The 2008 version of the Bitcoin bubble that set the world on fire in 2017 and 2018.

As long as it wasn't them left holding it, they were all busy passing the bomb.

Cold-blooded players hold their breath at times like this.

So did I.

I'd been rising above money, bit by bit.

Sums no individual could touch in a lifetime were moving through my hands.

Mostly it was just numbers on a screen—nothing you could touch.

The more detached I got, the colder and clearer I saw things.

A battlefield spread out in front of me, with individuals, groups, even whole nations in the fight.

No blood sprayed like in the wars of old, but this one was more terrifying.

Countries went bankrupt from flows of money and goods you couldn't even see.

And their people took the shrapnel of that bankruptcy.

Enemies, allies and coalition forces fought fiercely in a virtual space.

"On the sixteenth, the investment bank Bear Stearns goes under and gets merged into Morgan. At two dollars a share."

The great tiger that once ruled Wall Street and the world is going down.

Sold for next to nothing.

In a cold-blooded contest, that's how losers end up.

And the winner takes all.

I'd grabbed a piece of the great tiger's hide, too.

Short selling had made me a fortune.

I…