"Tam, let's just hope these guys don't suddenly decide to eat us alive." I passed it over. "What do you think our chances of survival are?"
That one startled her. I got the impression she was half thinking the same thing. Then she managed a thin laugh.
"We'll eat them first if they try."
"You still talk tough. I always told you you should have been a lawyer."
But she was right. Once the cards are dealt, you play to win.
Which is exactly what I planned to do. Since my own part was still down the road, that weekend I just sat in their offices watching spellbound as Noda and Dr. Tamara Richardson reviewed the data and put together the financial details. Next, a lot of coded telexes were sent out to pile up somewhere in Tokyo with instructions for routing of the funds.
After I'd digested his opening move, I did have occasion to ask the boss a few pointed questions. Such as, wasn't he at all nervous that Wall Street might rebound before he could get rolling? He replied, correctly as usual, that the total collapse in the financial markets would last for a while. Even though the dollar was still down for the count (over forty percent), he figured only the most intrepid foreign speculators would go plunging into the American stock market looking for bargains. As for American investors, most of them, including the institutions, were still in shock. He rightly forecast that the herd mentality of the Street hadn't been repealed. War stories of '87 were going around and nobody wanted to make the textbooks as a fool. Better a little profit forgone than more money lost. The mutual fund managers, most of whom had been caught with their pants at half-mast, were devoting their energies that weekend to composing creative explanations.
Events Monday proved him to be essentially on target. There was an eerie quiet over the financial landscape. Everybody was waiting for somebody else to try breathing life back into the corpse.
Then a few analysts noticed something peculiar. Anonymous buy orders were coming in, more and more, for stocks in the sector hardest hit, high tech. Maybe it was bargain hunters, but the buyers weren't any of the "growth" mutual funds that might have been expected to lead the action. In fact, many of those hotshot managers were relieved to part with some of the dogs they'd ridden down that long, lonesome decline of the week before.
Gradually the prices of certain securities began to edge up