Free Trigger Point by Matthew Glass Page A

used.’
    ‘You’re right, Joel. We’re completely different. It’s not the phenomenon that’s important to me. It’s the reality of it. It’s what it does to the people of South Africa. It’s what we do about it.’
    ‘I agree with that,’ said Joel. ‘I’m not being theoretical here. I apologize. That was badly expressed. What I mean is we have to start sharing leadership with them – over things like South Africa, for example – or we just won’t solve the problems we have to solve and we’re going to end up either with a very bad outcome or a fight. And it’s not easy, because they’re pissed. And they have a right to be. They didn’t get any of the influence we promised them after the financial crisis.’
    ‘What about their talk about rebalancing their economy?’ said Dave.
    ‘Exactly. They’re pissed. We’re pissed. So what, right? Countries have been pissed all through history. No, this is different. The nature of the problems we face doesn’t allow that. We can’t just stay pissed at each other and not want to cooperate. We have to cooperate, and fast. We cooperate – seriously cooperate – or we fight.’
    ‘That’s an extreme way of putting it,’ said Marion.
    Joel shrugged. ‘That’s what I think.’
    ‘I don’t agree with you. You’re way too black and white.’
    ‘Not as black and white as Tom Knowles.’
    Marion didn’t reply to that. She didn’t think Knowles’ thinking was generally black and white, but it seemed to have been this time. She didn’t agree with Joel that China was necessarily going to have to bail the US out of there – and she was even less in agreement with his contrarian view that that would be a good thing – but she did agree that launching the intervention unilaterally in Uganda would make a bunch of things on which they needed Chinese cooperation a lot harder to achieve.
    ‘My fear,’ said Joel, ‘is that Tom Knowles, even if he recognizes the need to make a switch of this magnitude, isn’t big enough to do anything about it.’
    ‘He’s a competent president,’ said Marion.
    ‘We need more than a competent president. We need someone much bigger than that.’
    ‘So we’re doomed to conflict in your opinion?’ Marion said it with a smile.
    ‘I fear we are,’ said Joel seriously, ‘unless Tom Knowles undergoes some kind of personality change. Or the next president. We might get lucky. I don’t know the time scale, but when the stresses build up like this the trigger can be anything.’

8
    IN HIS OFFICE on the thirty-fourth floor, Ed Grey turned up the volume on CNBC. Tony Evangelou and Boris Malevsky were with him.
    The screen showed a Senate committee room. Ron Strickland, chairman of the Federal Reserve, had already taken his seat at the table in front of the bar. A former professor of economics at Stanford, Strickland was a craggy-faced man with a head of silver hair, heavy brows, and a large wart on the left side of his chin. He was arranging his papers in front of him. A moment later the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Louisiana Republican Bill Givens, welcomed him, and Strickland commenced the presentation of his quarterly monetary policy report.
    He started with a survey of the state of the domestic economy and global trends. He then progressed to his projections for economic activity. Overall the outlook was benign, with risks weighted to the upside. Then came his inflation projections.
    Strickland was a slow-talking, methodical man. You didn’t listen to his speeches for entertainment. Yet Grey, Evangelou and Malevsky were hanging on his every word.
    ‘I now come to my view of the sustainability of market activity,’ said Strickland on the screen.
    Ed Grey leaned forward in his seat. This was the so-called bubble statement, an element in the chairman’s report in which he gave a view of sustainability of activity in critical investment markets – stocks, bonds, commodities, housing. Veiled references to