Shrewd traders were amassing fortunes on paper by shorting the stock indexes like the Standard and Poor’s 500, the 200, the 100. Holders of put options and short positions were popping champagne corks to celebrate their incredible good fortune.

In the commodity pits, the story was just the reverse. Sensing the impending shortage of lumber and agricultural commodities, speculators had bid up to the limit every available contract in lumber, corn, wheat, soybeans, oats, and cotton. This type of trading required very little money to control option contracts on enormous quantities of goods. As prices accelerated, paper profits available to margin more option contracts also increased. With the increased paper profits, the smart speculators stayed fully margined, which meant that their profits were accelerating geometrically.

In the stock market, there were only sellers. In the commodities markets, only buyers. All this frenzied activity was transmitted instantaneously by satellite data link to trading rooms in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Manila, Taipei, Singapore, Kuala Lampur, Jakarta, and Bangkok, where frantic traders were making urgent calls in the middle of the night to notify wealthy clients and to receive instructions.

Before all of the chaos began, Secretary Wong had tried to explain in the simplest possible terms the subtleties of the international markets to two new personal assistants. “It begins with the idea that the earth rotates on its axis toward the east,” he said. “That is why sunlight arrives first in countries that are situated to the east. Since each twenty-four-hour day has to start somewhere, the world’s scientific community decided, for the sake of clocks and calendars, to draw an imaginary line in the Pacific Ocean and call it the International Date Line. At this point, the old day theoretically ends and the new day begins. On the eastern side of the date line, when it’s Thursday, it’s Friday on the western side.

“The time difference between Washington, D.C., and Manila in the Philippines is twelve hours when we’re on daylight savings time. So nine o’clock Thursday night in Washington is nine o’clock Friday morning in Manila. But consider what the global time shifts mean to the world financial markets. If the French stock market closes at four P.M., it is ten A.M. in New York, but nighttime in Asia. When New York closes at four P.M., it is one P.M. in California, and very early morning in Hong Kong. When West Coast markets close, the markets in Asia are about to open. Then, market openings travel with the sun around Southeast Asia to India, to Europe, and back to New York.

“With a global economy comprised of trillions of dollars worth of stocks, commodities, bonds, currencies, and options, the world becomes a twenty-four-hour-a-day casino that only closes down on weekends. For serious traders in the big casino, sleep gets to be a rare luxury—even more so in a time of crisis.”