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Chapter 1 -- Sail Fed's Deluge: a Banquet on Noah
Lucinda Cheng
[2021, Atlanta]
This is the year of the great dollar liquidity crunch. A black Cayenne is cruising down the forest lane in Oakdale. Vince LeBar and the tech entrepreneurs at his boss’s house know very well, while most of its populations are locked inside, the world is going towards a reset. Many left in limbo want to traverse to the other side safely. This banquet is the boat.
The car is switching gears.
Vince Lebar settles in the backseat, gravitated towards the window. Fleeting leaf shadows and sunlight clouding over his eyes like bee flapping wings in amber. This is the first time in three years that he set foot in this forbidden area.
Coming from a middle-class family in Philadelphia, LeBar got into Yale by directing his life with one goal and strategy down to every detail -- to make it to Wall Street. He was recruited into the secrete society that ran rampant on the campus and met Marlow Forbin in a gathering. He became Marlow’s manager of his family office, Twin F fund.
When Marlow’s name surfaces in conversations in this circle, it drops a divider in people’s minds like a red velvet curtain in front of that black-and-white checkered flooring lodge: those who really know him will suddenly keep their mouths shut. Only will the outsiders refer to him with admiration as, the “architect of the internet”.
He glances over his Khaki Italian suits and his sienna Spanish shoes. He wants to dress up but not overshadowing. He wants them to like him.
It is his social debut today. Marlow is introducing the Twin-F fund to the Atlanta Tech Entrepreneurs club.
It is as if Marlow operates with a superior navigation system, Twin F sailed through the financial crisis and stock crashes that tanked a lot of ships, and transmutated from a legacy fund to a crypto fund.
During the last crisis in 2008, he built a math model and worked with a manager in Goldman Sachs to save his assets. Vince had met that manager from the “Transmutation” meeting held at Marlow’s Peachtree tower three years ago.
The year 2020 was the finale. On March 10th, the market hit a circuit breaker. Marlow launched his Twin F crypto fund right on the crash. At the moment, Fed is leaving the water tap open unlimited and all the assets are afloat. The entrepreneurs, sitting in the front roll for the unprecedented massive inflationary handouts, are also looking into an anti-inflation investment thesis.
No, no thesis within the box can traverse them safely to the other side. It’s not about what they do. It’s about who they listen to.
The group was testing each other on their intel from Goldman Sachs and the oil families in Texas.
And most importantly, what is the Black Pope, head of the Jesuits in the Vatican saying?
The car stops in front of a metal gate. Vince LeBar peers through the window slot and could barely saw a roman pillar behind layers of dark oak tree branches. The door clicks to open.
Gliding through a meandering lane, the car parks next to an orange Lamborghini. He gets off and sees an empty front yard and the grand mansion.
The white palace, designed by Marlow himself, looks more like a masonry church than a suburban home. Right above the door etches the mystical symbols and the family emblem. The marbles are not from within the country but mined from Tuscany in Italy.
He knocked on the door. There is no moving figure nor sound from the hall behind the glass pane. Waiting in the vast emptiness, he pushed the door open.
His long shadow casts on the pink and white marble with gold fills. He moves forward in the hall, looking around for the housekeeper and maid. The European style arch domes blocked his eyes. Then he saw the crowd is in the back yard.
Coming out of one of the arch passage, a man stumbles towards him. His hazed, hallowing eyes looking not at him, but passing him. Vince recognized this face was on the Forbes cover as a 30 under 30 entrepreneur in 2018. The man bumped his shoulder obliviously and was thrown off-balance. He glanced up at Vince, and muttered, “Another young lamb.”
Before he could make sense of the picture and conjure up words for a response, Marlow calls him from the side room, “Vince, help me over here.”
He passed the same arch where the man came from and saw Marlow stood outside of the kitchen door roasting paella. The chef stood next to him in a tall hat and tin buttoned uniform, looking like a white frosted ceremonial cake, watching over the grill attentively.
Marlow says with a splash of joy in his voice: “Vince, son, you look sharp today.”
Vince stared at the salmon, sausage, and rice, to which the chef responded, “He insisted doing it himself, to show the intimacy.”
Marlow turned to Vince and asked, “Two things, siphon the heck out of it; keep the pyramid steady. I’m going to introduce you to all the tech giants in Atlanta today. You are ready to knock them over with our crypto atomic bomb?”
Vince: “Yes, Marlow.”
* * * *
Rumor has spread in the backyard. The Silicon Valley lad tried to crash the party and was kicked out. The trees in Georgia grow like in the wild. The swimming pool and a fountain reside on the centerline of the symmetrical yard. The crowd stood in front of the fountain in circles.
Gordon holding the cup: “How did he get in here?”
Henry: “Slimy like a rat. No one had seen him.”
A blonde says: “He tailed a car to get in the gate.”
Brandon: “The bank wouldn’t loan to him. He will go bankrupt in three months.”
Henry: “He flew over here from the Bay trying to fix it with Marlow.”
Gordon: ”How did he got kicked out? What did he do?”
Brandon: "Marlow was trying to raise for Twin-F. Theodore brought in these Native American tribe seniors and a beauty pageant saying they have money. You know how Theodore got to where he was. He connects money with power. But turns out, Marlow spent 40 grand on hosting the group and they didn't have money."
Henry: "The sheer audacity."
All those left at the party got a ticket to the boat.
Marlow appears in the crowd and rang the glass, "Let’s move to the living room. My manager is giving a speech on Twin F."
The circle settled in the coaches. Marlow opens, "How is everyone? AA is trading at 343 times forward earnings. Tesla is trading at 28 times trailing revenue. Has your net worth gone up? But do you dare to keep your assets in this deranged stock market?
QE is a god, ever more powerful than since 2008, pulling strings on all asset prices and flooding all markets on a global scale. We are here to help you sail.
Yes, we are in an everything bubble. Good luck looking for the market fundamentals. And you shouldn’t make the mistake Germans made before WWII, storing your values in the inelastic gold stales the economy. On the other hand, Bitcoin is too volatile for you.
I know many of you here are worried about the debt level. In fact, I have received a message a few days ago. We are going to have a debt Jubilee, meaning, in its Biblical sense, all the debts are to be forgiven.
This is a message just for you. I want you to all leave it here before you walk out of the door today: A new money is in the making. A new Central Bank - Crypto blend is the future. To help forge the path, we created Twin F three years ago, launched right on the March market crash. In fact, we have already attracted a lot of institutional and corporation’s interests.
The initial APY of Twin F token is 4%. It’s on the less crazy side in this field. However, by investing in physical smart cities, municipal bonds, and doing Bitcoin tradings, it can reach an exponential increase in two years. This is how the central bank started, and this is how the dollar is minted.
The killer app of crypto is already here. It’s called the rapid liquidity provider. When crowdfunding collides with the real economy in a liquidity crunch, you will soon see the nuclear fission effect.
We recommend you allocate Twin F as a portion of your company’s treasury. Let me introduce my manager, Vince LeBar to give you the details."
Vince walks into gazes from the glittering eyes, which remind him the night when he fended against ten coyotes in the camping cave.