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It had been four days since Lehman Brothers had been allowed to fail, but the most powerful effects of the collapse were being felt right now. The stocks of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were tanking, and it was clear that nothing short of the U.S. government could save them. "It was the equivalent of the earthquake going off," he said, "and then, much later, the tsunami arrives." Danny's trading life was man versus man, but this felt more like man versus nature: The synthetic CDO had become a synthetic natural disaster. "Usually, you feel you have the ability to control your environment," said Danny. "You're good because you know what's going on. Now it didn't matter what I knew. Feel went out the window."

FrontPoint had maybe seventy different bets on, in various stock markets around the world. All of them were on financial institutions. He scrambled to keep a handle on them all, but couldn't. They owned shares in KeyBank and were short the shares of Bank of America, both of which were doing things they'd never done before. "There were no bids in the market for anything," said Danny. "There was no market. It was really only then that I realized there was a bigger issue than just our portfolio. Fundamentals didn't matter. Stocks were going to move up or down on pure emotion and speculation of what the government would do." The most unsettling loose thought rattling around his mind was that Morgan Stanley was about to go under. Their fund was owned by Morgan Stanley. They had almost nothing to do with Morgan Stanley, and felt little kinship with the place. They did not act or feel like Morgan Stanley employees--Eisman often said how much he wished he was allowed to short Morgan Stanley stock. They acted and felt like the managers of their own fund. If Morgan Stanley failed, however, its share in their fund wound up as an asset in a bankruptcy proceeding. "I'm thinking, We've got the world by the fucking balls and the company we work for is going bankrupt?"

Then Danny sensed something seriously wrong--with himself. Just before eleven in the morning, wavy black lines appeared in the space between his eyes and his computer screen. The screen appeared to be fading in and out. "I felt this shooting pain in my head," he said. "I don't get headaches. I thought I was having an aneurysm." Now he became aware of his heart--he looked down and he could actually see it banging against his chest. "I spend my morning trying to control all this energy and all this information," he said, "and I lost control."

He'd had this experience only once before. On September 11, 2001, at 8:46 a.m., he'd been at his desk on the top floor of the World Financial Center. "You know when you're in the city and one of those garbage trucks passes and you're like, 'What the fuck was that?'" Until someone told him it was a commuter plane hitting the North Tower, he assumed the first plane was one of those trucks. He walked to the window to look up at the building across the street. A small commuter plane wouldn't have been big or strong enough to do all that much damage, to his way of thinking, and he expected to see it poking out of the side of the building. All he could see was the black hole, and smoke. "My first thought was, That was not an accident. No fucking way." He was still working at Oppenheimer and Co.--Steve and Vinny had already left--and some authoritative-sounding voice came over the loudspeaker to announce that no one was to leave the building. Danny remained at the window. "That's when people started jumping," he said. "Bodies are falling." The rumble of another garbage truck. "When the second plane hit I was like, 'Bye, everybody.'" By the time he reached the elevator, he found himself escorting two pregnant women. He walked them uptown, left one at her apartment on Fourteenth Street and the other at the Plaza Hotel, and then walked home to his pregnant wife on Seventy-second Street.

Four days later he was leaving, or rather fleeing, New York City with his wife and small son. They were on the highway at night in the