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Excerpt from the Book
CHAPTER ONE: Jace, February 2009
Jace Orren sat at his desk waiting for a call from the President of the United States. He had talked to prior Presidents, had shaken their hands and posed with them for glossy pictures – the kind that were taken following big contributions at fund raisers. This wasn’t that kind of thing. Ironically, the President wanted to give him – his bank – money. A few billion dollars. The President was calling to lean on him to take TARP funds Congress had recently approved to bail out banks. Jace didn’t want the money.
He looked out his windowed wall overlooking the expanse of Dallas forty floors below him. Prairie National Bank sat on the southeast edge of downtown and with its distinctive pyramid roof and emerald green exterior had ten years earlier won its share of architectural kudos when it first added to the city’s skyline. He loved the building. It was Texas-sized. A man could look at it and feel proud that he had gotten something big done with his life. He knew he hadn’t built the bank by himself, he knew he’d been lucky, he knew God had smiled on him, and he knew he ought to be a little more modest about it all, but he wasn’t. He was proud.
The call was already five minutes late. He wondered if it was hard for the President to stick to a timetable. The causes for delay could be anything. He imagined the President apologizing for the delay because he had to deal with a terrorist strike at an embassy somewhere. What a nuisance, the President would say. Jace laughed at the ramblings of his mind. He admitted to himself that his nerves were a little on edge. A one on one call with the President of the United States was reason enough for a degree of anxiety, but knowing that he had to figure out how to say no to a President’s request, that was something he had never imagined himself doing.
He stared at the phone, waiting for Melissa, his assistant, to tell him that he should pick up. He thought it was stupid staring at a phone so he looked around his office instead. Some days it seemed so large it should be measured in acres. The area with the leather sofa and cocktail table and club chairs looked more like a seating area from an exclusive old English men’s club – yet it was there that he conducted many of his meetings. He preferred not to have his desk between himself and whomever else there might be. His eyes then fell on the samurai sword hung on the wall opposite his desk. The sword his father had captured on a Pacific battlefield during World War II. The details of how his dad had got it tended to vary over time, like a lot of his dad’s wartime stories, but it was a real sword and it was over three hundred years old and it was the only thing his father had left him when he died so many years ago.
He thought he knew what the President was going to tell him. Prairie National was the tenth largest bank in the country with over $88 billion in assets and he, the President, wanted them all to deal with the current financial crisis together. It was their patriotic duty to endorse the Treasury Department’s bank rescue plan. The country was depending on its success. That meant they would all take the bailout money, whether they needed it or not. Jace knew that a couple of the banks that had not needed it had been persuaded to take it. As far as Jace was concerned, taking the TARP money would serve as an admission that the banks didn’t know how to manage themselves. They needed the government to save them. Jace worried how that would play out. He could too easily imagine the government waltzing right into his Boardroom and taking a seat.
The call would have been easier for him if his bank was as much a basket case as his larger competitors. Desperation would have made it easier to swallow. But Prairie National wasn’t in desperate straits, at least not yet. Still, an extra couple of billion dollars of capital would do great things for its balance sheet. The risks the bank was running now would be reduced; no question it was vulnerable.
Melissa came into his office. “The President’s office is on the phone.”
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