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By Root 284 0

middle of a storm when he was overcome by the certainty that a tree would fall and crush the car. He began to shake and sweat with sheer terror. The trees were fifty yards away: They could never reach the car. "You need to see someone," his wife said, and he had. He had thought he might have something wrong with his heart, and had spent half a day hooked up to an EKG machine. The loss of self-control embarrassed him--he preferred not to talk about it--and he was deeply relieved when the attacks became less frequent and less severe. Finally, a few months after the terrorist attack, they vanished completely.

On September 18, 2008, he failed to make the connection between how he'd felt then and how he felt now. He rose from his desk and looked for someone. Eisman normally sat across from him, but Eisman was out at some conference trying to raise money--which showed you how unprepared they all were at the arrival of the moment for which they thought themselves perfectly prepared. Danny turned to the colleague beside him. "Porter, I think I'm having a heart attack," he said.

Porter Collins laughed and said, "No, you're not." An Olympic rowing career had left Porter Collins a bit inured to the pain of others, as he assumed they usually didn't know what pain was.

"No," said Danny. "I need to go to the hospital." His face had gone pale but he was still able to stand on his own two feet. How bad could it be? Danny was always a little jumpy.

"That's why he's good at his job," said Porter. "I kept saying, 'You're not having a heart attack.' Then he stopped talking. And I said, 'All right, maybe you are.'" This actually wasn't all that helpful. Unsteadily, Danny turned to Vinny, who had been watching everything from the far end of the long trading desk and was thinking about calling an ambulance.

"I got to get out of here. Now," he said.

Cornwall Capital's bet against subprime mortgage bonds had quadrupled its capital, from a bit more than $30 million to $135 million, but its three founders never had a Champagne moment. "We were focused on, Where do we put our money that's safe?" said Ben Hockett. Before, they had no money. Now, they were rich; but they feared they had no ability to preserve their wealth. By nature a bit tortured, they were now, by nurture, even more so. They actually spent time wondering how people who had been so sensationally right (i.e., they themselves) could preserve the capacity for diffidence and doubt and uncertainty that had enabled them to be right. The more sure you were of yourself and your judgment, the harder it was to find opportunities premised on the notion that you were, in the end, probably wrong.

The long-shot bet, in some strange way, was a young man's game. Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai no longer felt, or acted, quite so young. Charlie now suffered from migraines, and was consumed with what might happen next. "I think there is something fundamentally scary about our democracy," said Charlie. "Because I think people have a sense that the system is rigged, and it's hard to argue that it isn't." He and Jamie spent a surprising amount of their time and energy thinking up ways to attack what they viewed as a deeply corrupt financial system. They cooked up a plan to seek revenge upon the rating agencies, for instance. They'd form a not-for-profit legal entity whose sole purpose was to sue Moody's and S&P, and donate the proceeds to investors who lost money investing in triple-A-rated securities.

As Jamie put it, "Our plan was to go around to investors and say, 'You guys don't know how badly you got fucked. You guys should really sue.'" They'd had so many bad experiences with big Wall Street firms, and the people who depended on them for their living, that they feared sharing the idea with New York lawyers. They drove up to Portland, Maine, and found a law firm who would listen to them. "They were just like, 'You guys are nuts,'" said Charlie. Suing the rating agencies for the inaccuracy of their ratings, the Maine lawyers told them, would be like suing Motor Trend magazine for plugging a car