THE HEDGE FUND MANAGER

He's sprawled out on a beach towel, with a drink ready at hand.

"Hey, you mind sittin' over there?" he says, pointing me toward his left side. "Yeah, sorry, you were blockin' my sun is all."

He stretches out his legs. "Ahhh, much better. Man, this apocalypse is nice, huh?"

I knew a lot of guys who took a dive.

Our offices had a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

When the market shut down for good, there were a bunch of people in my office who you'd catch just sort of staring at it.

Not all of them were jumpers. But they were all thinkin' about it.

The indexes had only dropped by about half before the shutdown. It would've moved faster, were it not for all the passively-managed 401k funds.

We could all do the math. Over 90 percent of the companies I'd personally invested in were completely worthless. But I was okay, because I had a decent amount of paid-off real estate.

A lot of these guys I worked with had it way worse.

They were gonna go all the way to zero.

Lower than zero, in fact, because they were all highly leveraged. Debt on the house, debt on the car, debt on their kids' school loans, debt on the boat, hell, debt on their $200 silk shirts. Even that was paid for on the credit card.

Obviously all the funds and firms shut down right along with the market, so the next paycheck was never coming in. They'd all have less-than-zero in a world that no longer valued their skills.

The only thing a lot of these guys had was a life insurance policy.

Jesus, it took weeks for them to dredge those bodies out of the bay.

Meanwhile I was making money. I owned a shitload of boats. High-end ones, borderline yachts. Everybody told me it was a total cash-sink. But after things went down, I started renting them out to the people pulling up the bodies. That's dark, I know, but somebody's gotta do it. I sold a few boats at a major markup to other rich folks, too.

A lot of people prefer to live on the water now, you know, in case another thing like Bastille Day II happens.

Regardless, a lot of 'em had to leave the towers they'd been livin' in.

The rate at which those things got taken over by the homeless was just totally incredible. I guess so many people were fleeing the city and leaving behind their nice lofts that squatters saw it as a chance to move in—created a big feedback loop. More squatters in the towers meant more people fleeing, which made more room for the squatters.

Me, I don't worry about none of it. I just lay out here on the beach, drinking perfectly identical margaritas and reading borderline identical crime novels. My wife pretty much stays busy watching a bunch of movies. One of her friends repped her some copies of these hard drives that have, like, every movie ever made on them. Unbelievable.

Hey, you wanna watch Casablanca?