However improbable Pete's ascendance to the top wrung of the plunge prevention ladder may have been, he soon settled in to the work.  It took a year or so, but the market undid the damage caused by his initial efforts q.v., and was again hitting daily new peaks.  Those who had chosen him were quick to forgive his early bumbling, writing it off as bad luck coupled with inadequate ship-to-shore communications on Long Island Sound, which could hardly be blamed on Pete. They needed someone for the work, and he was their guy.

He had been told to show up for work in the cavernous Department of Commerce building, where he, and what was to become his group, occupied a particularly dingy and decrepit suite of offices on the sixth floor. The assignment of the task to Commerce was essentially random, perhaps the result of a lost football bet, perhaps because Treasury didn't want it. Those familiar with the Department of Commerce soon learn that it is an odd pastiche of independent agencies that function quite effectively without leadership.  Nevertheless, in the generous spirit that has prevailed in Congress for many decades now, several large dollops of bureaucratic layering have been provided just in case a serious lack of interface coordination broke out, or some similar bureaucratic malady managed to embarrass the powers at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.  And it was into this formless phalanx of ciphers that Pete was assigned to work. The formless phalanx, for their part, had rewarded him with the worst offices on the worst floor, which was otherwise occupied only by hapless contractors and other pariahs. He didn't know it, but he had been lucky to avoid the now empty halls in the basement containing the empty fish tanks of the former, and now deserted, national aquarium, where a vocal but ultimately outvoted contingent of the phalanx would have put him.

Newcomers to government service might naively suppose that being chosen for Plunge Prevention was a plum assignment. It wasn't. The first rule of bureaucratic life is to find a sinecure that has a definite, discrete, and safe function that would always be needed, to then build several protective layers of complexity around that function, while learning with painstaking thoroughness every possible wrinkle of how it both worked and didn't work in the real world. The final rule was to then grasp hold of the sinecure with a death grip, just in case anyone else ever tried to wrestle it away.  The wrestling away part was both the local sport and the very purpose of existence.  Consequently, members of the phalanx wasted no love on one another, and spent their days assembling and breaking apart minor empires of functionaries, all the while paying lip service to the layer of political appointees above who pretended to need this functionality or that to solve the problems of the day.  When offered the chance to get in on the ground floors of the Plunge Prevention team, all offered the chance had demurred, since the odds of failure were unpleasantly high with no possibility of reward beyond the grudging recognition from the few members of the phalanx that had been allowed in on the secret.  More importantly, no one understood the work, and as all the members were in fact highly intelligent and quite capable of realistic assessment, whether or not actually allowed to practice it, they knew that only a fool would take the job.  Pete was their guy too.

The key to plunge prevention, Pete reasoned, was to keep belief and reality from bothering each other.  As long as investors believed the economy was growing nicely, neither too fast nor too slow, the game would go on despite the hideously dangerous and most unpleasant realities that lurked on every side. So he dashed off a series of memos explaining how important it was not to rock the boat, rattle sabers, whistle in the dark, and any number of similar, tired metaphors summoned up to fill pages with weighty-looking text. The memos were universally ignored by the few allowed any inkling that the government was dabbling in these dark arts. Pete became quite good at patching bubbles about to pop, papering over bottomless pits, and blowing smoke with the best. Whenever anyone asked skeptically if his function was really necessary, he'd point out that the market hadn't plunged for sometime, which was all the proof anyone could need. He read about tulip manias, hedge funds, and other popular delusions throughout history. He and his group prepared plans for what would happen to the people once the market plunge had washed over them. "Entrepreneur the hell out of any hole" was the thought. At first the best the team could come up with was individual emergency packages on how to buy real estate with no money down, or on how to get it back with stock trading strategies based on stochastics, but eventually they prepared versions of the old 'carry trade' routine so clear that even saintly grandmothers, widows and orphans could figure out how to play. They also decided to let the common man in on the world's biggest casino game, currency trading, and had dozens of online brokerages ready to spring to life the morning after the big one.  Jim Cramer himself had agreed to lead the President's Mad Money Council to flood the airwaves with stock tips just after the crash. Toy companies were even persuaded to stock millions of little Maria Bartiromo dolls just in case a few of the more creative team members could think of a suitable use for them as the panic set in.

Whether it was this or something else that caught his attention, Treasury Secretary Paulson began to take an interest. q.v. He had heard of the Plunge Prevention team in the cloud of whispers that hiss around the more senior heads of government, and had even glanced at a few of the more prescient of Pete's memos. But he doubted there could be a second group of plunge preventers equal to the crew down on the Goldman Sachs trading floor. No longer trusting the mandarins who had appointed Pete the year before, he decided to find out for himself what the government's approach to plunge prevention really was. He managed to slip away one afternoon past all the spear carriers and juju men, crossed the street, and walked down the block to Commerce to find Pete's task force. Before leaving he took one precaution, since Commerce was unknown territory among those with actual power, and filled his pockets up with a wad of thousand dollar bills, which had been a good-bye present from one of those Goldman Sachs traders who knew of Paulson's inability to find his way out of mazes, and had once had to help him Hansel-and-Grettle his way home from a competitor's labyrinthine office.  The treasury secretary tore a hole in his trouser pocket, repocketed the wad, and got off the sixth floor elevator. A half hour later, after much walking around and after depositing a money trail from his trouser leg that doubled back on itself several times, he arrived at the Plunge Prevention offices. The name on the door said something else, of course.

Pete was nonplussed but glad of the companionship, plunge prevention being a lonely business.  "Mr. Secretary, how nice to see you. Say, how are your 'Monkeymanz' doing anyhow?" He threw in this last part out of nervousness, simply because he believed that Wall Street types would appreciate the implied depth of his financial knowledge. "Never you mind," was all the Secretary said.  He looked around a few times, stared intently at Pete and then at the walls, made a note in a pad, and then said, over his shoulder in leaving, "You're missing the point: prevention not mitigation. And this won't do; we're going to have to get you some better offices." Apparently he found the way out to the avenue.  When Pete left a half hour later there were only several remaining thousand dollar bills still to be seen on the way to the elevator.  He bent down for a few, rolled them up, and lit them, despite the multiple warnings for anyone caught smoking on a federal elevator. There's no biz like the Plunge Prevention biz, thought Pete on his way out the door.

He spent most of the following day on a bench in Lafayette Park feeding the pigeons, while workman ripped out the existing walls on the twelfth floor of the Hotel Washington and installed what could only be described as a lavish office that occupied the entire floor, with a commanding view overlooking the White House.  His time outside was not entirely wasted, however, as he was able to use his cell to dial the junior Chinese finance minister at his home in Beijing, waking him from a deep sleep, with a long and rambling, but hopefully preventative, discussion on the need to revalue the Yuan.  He then telephoned a number of banking houses dealing in credit derivatives and cooled down the panic of the moment. Finally, he walked over to Treasury to sit in on a meeting where a number of the boys from various primary bond dealers were receiving verbal abuse from their elders and betters about unsafe trading practices when using repos. No one was going to slam the wire on his watch. Ah, what fun.