Читать книгу The Fix - Vaughan Liam - Страница 7

Thomas Alexander William Hayes had always been an outsider. Born in 1979 and raised in the urban sprawl of Hammersmith, West London, Hayes was bright but found it hard to connect with other kids. His parents divorced when he was in primary school. When his mother Sandra remarried, she took Hayes and his younger brother Robin to live with her new husband, a management consultant, and his two children in the leafy, affluent commuter town of Winchester, bordering a stretch of bucolic countryside in the south of England. The couple fostered a child and later had a daughter of their own. They bought a big house on a pretty street lined with them. It was always full.

Hayes's mother was a naturally timid woman, and when Hayes misbehaved or became angry, she did everything she could to placate him. From an early age few people said no to him. In his teenage years, Hayes saw less of his father Nick, a left-wing journalist and documentary filmmaker who relocated to Manchester in the north of the country with his girlfriend, a crossword writer for The Guardian newspaper. Hayes attended Westgate, a well-regarded state secondary school a 10-minute walk from his new home, and then Peter Symonds, a sixth-form college that was even closer. His college math teacher, Tania Zeigler, remembers him as a “kind, thoughtful and normal” student.4 Hayes achieved good grades but had a small circle of friends. Awkward and quiet, with lank, scraggly hair and acne, he rarely socialized and wouldn't learn to drive until he was in his thirties. When he did venture to the pub, he usually had one eye on the slot machines, waiting to pounce after someone else had emptied his pockets. Surrounded by the children of well-to-do professionals, he held onto his inner-city London accent, traveling back on weekends to watch his beloved football team, the perennial underdogs Queens Park Rangers.

Hayes was a decent footballer, but from a young age favored solitary pastimes that fostered his natural ability for mathematics: computer games, puzzles and an ardent devotion to QPR, which offered a nerd's paradise of statistics, history and results to pore over. Fixations – along with social problems, elevated stress levels and a propensity for numbers over words – are a symptom of Asperger's, but in the years before works like The Imitation Game and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time made the condition better understood, Hayes just struck people as withdrawn.

Hayes remained a peripheral figure at the University of Nottingham, where he studied math and engineering. While his fellow students took their summer holidays, he worked 90-hour weeks cleaning pots and pulling pints behind the bar of a local pub for £2.70 an hour. He had no desire to go abroad when he could be earning money. Even when carrying out menial tasks, he prided himself on his dedication. “It didn't matter whether I was cleaning a deep fat fryer or deboning a chicken, those jobs got left to me because they knew there would be no chicken left on the bone and there would be no fat in the fryer,” Hayes would later explain. “That's just the way I am.”5

Toward the end of his course he secured a 10-week internship at UBS in London, working on the collateral-management desk, a mundane but complex station where it was difficult to stand out. But Hayes did, and the Swiss bank offered him a full-time role when he finished his studies. Hayes turned it down in order to find a trading position. That's where the real excitement was.

After graduating in 2001, Hayes got his wish, joining the rapidly expanding RBS as a trainee on the interest-rate derivatives desk. For 20 minutes a day, as a reward for making the tea and collecting dry cleaning, he was allowed to ask the traders anything he wanted. It was an epiphany. Unlike the messy interactions and hidden agendas that characterized day-to-day life, the formula for success in finance was clear: Make money and everything else will follow. It became Hayes's guiding principle, and he began to read voraciously about markets, options-pricing models, interest rate curves, and other financial arcana.

Within a year Hayes was given a small trading book to look after while its main trader in Asia was away from the office. His risk limits were tiny, but it gave Hayes real-time exposure to the financial instruments, such as swaps, that he would go on to master. His timing was perfect. Swaps, in which parties agree to exchange a floating rate of interest for a fixed one, were originally used to protect companies from fluctuations in interest rates. By the time Hayes arrived they were mostly bought and sold between professional traders at banks and hedge funds, another high-stakes security to wager the future on. In 1998, about $36 trillion of the instruments changed hands. Within seven years that had exploded to $169 trillion. By the end of the decade it was closer to $349 trillion.6 It was a gold rush.

In the laddish, hedonistic culture of the markets, the 21-year-old Hayes was an odd fit. On the rare occasions he joined bankers and brokers on their nights out, Hayes stuck to hot chocolate. They called him “Tommy Chocolate” behind his back and blurted out Rain Man quotes like “Qantas never crashed” as Hayes shuffled round the trading floor. He was bad at banter, given to taking quips and digs at face value. The superhero duvet was a particular point of derision. The bedding was perfectly adequate, Hayes thought; he didn't see the point in buying another one.

There were also signs of his soon-to-be notorious temper. According to one story that made its way round the City of London, Hayes began seeing a woman from his office and one night arranged to make her dinner. Hayes cooked, while his date had a bath. When he'd finished, he called for her to join him. After asking for a third time, Hayes became so irritated he barged into the bathroom and poured a dish of shepherd's pie into the bath with her. The episode quickly entered trading floor legend, and traders and brokers took to hollering “aye aye shepherd's pie” and “get in the bath!”.

At work, the complex calculations and constant mental exertion involved in trading derivatives came easily, but Hayes found he had something rarer: a steely stomach for risk. While other new recruits looked to book their gains or curb short-term losses, Hayes rode volatile market movements like a seasoned rodeo rider. In those early years he hit the dirt as often as he was successful, but his talent was clear and in 2004 he was headhunted by Royal Bank of Canada, a smaller outfit where Hayes could take a position of prominence and rise more quickly.

RBC's London operation wasn't set up to trade the full gamut of derivatives products, so Hayes spent the first year or so working with a team of quantitative analysts and IT specialists to bring the bank's systems up to his standards. Hayes was a perfectionist, and, still in his early twenties, he helped the firm design a platform that could monitor minute shifts in profit and loss and risk exposure in real time – a set-up more advanced than at many of the biggest players in the market. It was a process Hayes would go on to repeat each time he started at a new firm.

Finally, Hayes was satisfied, and he leapt into the market with his own trading book. Traders at the largest firms recall suddenly seeing minnow RBC taking the other side of big-ticket deals. Hayes may have been baffled by the simple rituals of office camaraderie, but when he looked at the convoluted world of yen derivatives he saw clarity. “The success of getting it right, the success of finding market inefficiencies, the success of identifying opportunities and then when you get it right – it's like solving that equation,” Hayes would later explain in his nasal, pedantic delivery. “It's make money, lose money, and it's just so pure.”7

In poker, there are two types of player: tight folk who wait for the best cards, then bet big and hope to get paid; and hawks who can't resist getting involved in every hand, needling opponents and scaring the nervous ones into folding. Hayes was firmly in the latter camp. His M.O. was to trade constantly, picking up snippets of information, racking up commissions as a market maker and building a persona as a high-volume, high-stakes risk-taker.

Hayes's success on the trading floor brought a newfound confidence to the naturally reticent young man. Trading is primarily a solitary pursuit, one individual's battle against the world, armed only with his guile, a bank of screens and a phone. Still, among the derivative traders and quants Hayes found kindred spirits, people for whom systems and patterns were second nature and who shared his passion for financial markets and economics. He was quick to dismiss those he considered lacking in talent. Salespeople – the polished, mostly privately educated, multilingual young men and women drafted in droves by prestigious investment banks to be their public face – were given particularly short shrift.

As a state-school-educated Londoner with a cockney twang and a love of football, Hayes felt he had more in common with the mostly working-class interdealer brokers who matched up buyers and sellers. Naturally suspicious of other people's intentions, Hayes took months before he warmed to a broker. Once he did, he called him incessantly, prodding him for information about rivals at other firms and scolding him if he felt he was getting quoted poor prices. If he pushed too far, slamming down the phone or dishing out profanities, he would call back to apologize and throw some extra business the broker's way. Hayes was loyal to those he considered to be on his side and merciless with anyone he didn't. Everything was black and white. The contacts he made early in his career at the banks and interdealer brokers in London would play a pivotal role later when his gaze fixed firmly on Libor.

For all the ribbing Hayes took on the trading floor, he had found a place where he belonged. He rose early, worked at least 12 hours a day and rarely stayed awake past 10 p.m. He often got up to check his trading positions during the night. And ultimately, Hayes went along with the jokes because the obsessive traits that had marginalized him socially turned into assets the moment he logged on to his terminal.

In the spring of 2006, a headhunter put Hayes in touch with an Australian banker named Anthony Robson who was recruiting for his sales desk at UBS. The pair met in a quiet corner of a branch of Corney & Barrow, a chain of basement haunts popular with City of London bankers where deals are forged over pints of ale and pie and mash. Within five minutes it was obvious to Robson that Hayes, with his scruffy demeanor and idiosyncrasies, wasn't suited to a client-facing role. But there was something undeniably intriguing about the blond-haired kid who barely broke for breath. For an hour and a half they talked about trading methodologies, interest-rate curves and derivatives pricing models. Hayes spoke with a zeal and depth of knowledge that left Robson astounded. When the meeting was over, Robson was convinced he'd met one of the most gifted individuals he'd ever interviewed. That night he put Hayes in contact with one of his counterparts in Tokyo.

In March 2006, the Japanese central bank had announced plans to curb overheating in the economy by raising interest rates for the first time in more than a decade. The move brought volatility to money markets that had been dormant, spurring a wave of buying and selling in cash, forwards and short-term interest-rate derivatives. Keen to capitalize, UBS was putting together a small team of front-end traders, who dealt in instruments that matured within two or three years. Hayes would be the perfect addition. At the time, yen was still considered something of a backwater within the banks, a steppingstone on the way to the big leagues of trading dollars or euros. The market was full of inexperienced traders not savvy enough to know when they were being fleeced. Hayes was nervous about moving to the other side of the world but sensed it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

RBS, RBC, UBS – the name on the door mattered little to Hayes, as long as he had the bank's balance sheet to wager. That summer he packed up his belongings, said goodbye to his family and boarded a flight to Tokyo. It was a major promotion that officially retired his image as a cocoa-sipping, blankie-clutching eccentric and recognized him for what he'd become: an aggressive and formidable trader. Headquartered in Zurich, UBS was a powerhouse, combining a vast balance sheet with a hard-charging Wall Street ethos and the freedom afforded by a hands-off Swiss regulator. The culture was aggressive and, as would later be proved, fatally predisposed to corruption.8 Traders were king, and as long as they were making money, few questions were asked.

Hayes found a small apartment a short subway ride to UBS's Tokyo headquarters. His girlfriend, a young British saleswoman he'd met at RBS named Sarah Ainsworth, moved to Tokyo with Calyon Securities around the same time. The relationship petered out. The couple never saw each other. One or two old contacts from London and some particularly persistent brokers dragged Hayes out for a pint now and then amid the neon lights of Tokyo, where a wealthy young expat could have some serious fun, but Hayes was irritatingly distracted company. He had developed a more rarefied addiction.

Interest-rate swaps, forward rate agreements, basis swaps, overnight indexed swaps – the menu of complex financial instruments Hayes bought and sold came in a thousand varieties, but they shared one thing in common: Their value rose and fell with reference to benchmark interest rates, and, in particular, to Libor. Where Libor would land the next day was the great unknowable. Yet it was the difference between success and failure, profit or loss, glory or ignominy. Trading, like any other form of gambling, involves attempting to build a sense of the future based on incomplete and evolving information: rumor, historic market behavior, macroeconomic events, business flows elsewhere inside the bank. The better information a trader has, the greater his edge and the more money he can make. It became Hayes's mission to control the chaos around him, to eradicate the shades of gray. “I used to dream about Libor,” Hayes said years later. “They were my bread and butter, you know. They were the instrument that underlined everything that I traded … I was obsessed.”9