NO SOONER HAD HE HUNG UP the phone than James’s assistant announced another call. This time, it was the managing director of the bank clearing house in Brussels known as the Society for Worldwide Inter Fund Transfers, or SWIFT.

Unlike the previous call, James Wong feared what this one might bring. For the past five years, all of the major banks had been clamoring for a system to transfer money without checks. The cost of physically transporting checks and bank drafts, verifying information, and processing paper ran into hundreds of millions of dollars annually. How much better to have all banking transactions handled by wire— computer to computer. Then, in the bankers’ perfect world, there would be no cash—only a card for consumers—a smart card—with balances updated with each use.

In that checkless, cashless world, there would be no money, per se. Only computer entries controlled by a cascade of regional computer systems, finally terminating at the World Inter Fund computers in Brussels.

There was just one problem with this perfect world, however. The genius who designed the system had failed to reckon with what would happen to SWIFT if all the banking computers were destroyed in a state whose economy was equal in size to the seventh largest nation on earth. Would transfers originating in California be honored? If they had been honored, should they be canceled? If they were canceled, what institution in existence was capable of making good on the financial obligations? Then, what would happen if the computers that controlled the world’s eight largest banks, situated in Japan, the world’s second largest economy, suddenly crashed?

The answer was simple to James Wong. The whole thing would shut down, and the world would be out of credit. Trillions of dollars of financial assets would be on hold until swarms of computer programmers could recreate every transaction. Then, hordes of lawyers would have to sort through the legal ramifications of who owned what and where.

He smiled as he thought of the jubilant speculators who thought they had made billions playing the market crash and gambling on the impending shortage of commodities. Thinking of the financial carnage, he realized that no one with sufficient money would be around to honor those options, neither the shorts nor the longs, the puts nor the calls.

And then he recalled the words of an ancient prophet, “It will be the same for the seller as for the buyer, for the borrower as for the lender, for the debtor as for the creditor, the earth will be completely laid waste and plundered.” How odd to know that today he was the man who would see the fulfillment of those words as perhaps no other had ever done.