“You don’t want to know. The markets crash. The price of gasoline drops.”
“That’s a good thing, right?” Miles asked. “Let’s fill ’er up!”
“It’s good up to a point,” Cameron said. “PetroPlex will probably do something desperate to try to recover and prevent bankruptcy. I didn’t intend to use this virus unless PetroPlex released my original program. The virus was designed to counteract the effects of the original program, not to destroy a functioning market.”
“Bankruptcy?” Nash asked. He sounded skeptical.
“I don’t think you understand the magnitude of what this thing will do. The financial markets are a very delicate balancing act that isn’t that hard to disrupt.”
Cameron peeled out of the parking garage. He drove fast—a little too fast. The buildings of downtown Dallas whipped past us.
“Dude!” Miles said. “Pedestrian!”
Cameron swerved around an idiot who was standing in the middle of Elm Street on the X that marked the spot where JFK had been assassinated. “Moron,” he said, before pulling onto the freeway.
I was worried he was going to attract unwanted attention. I had an uneasy feeling in my chest.
“Slow it down some,” I said. But it wasn’t just Cameron’s speed that was bothering me. All this stuff about the financial markets didn’t make any sense. “If it’s so easy to manipulate the energy market, how come someone hasn’t done it already?”
“Who says they haven’t?” Cameron asked. “Remember when the stock market lost a trillion dollars in a matter of minutes in May 2010 because of a computer glitch?”
I didn’t, as I had long since pulled all the money I had in the stock market out and converted it to cash. And spent it. On Ramen. Ugh.
“I remember,” Nash said.
“How is that possible?” Miles said. “I don’t understand the financial markets.”
Cameron eased his foot off the gas pedal some. “If you did, you’d be rich. If everybody knew what the people on Wall Street know, the country would look a whole lot different than it does today, I suspect.”
“But you get it, right?” Miles asked. “Otherwise you couldn’t have written the program.”
“I know enough to be dangerous,” Cameron said. “The energy market is a little different than the stock market. It works kind of like this. Oil is a commodity, right? So it’s not traded on the stock market. It’s historically been traded on the NYMEX, the New York Mercantile Exchange, which is the market where businesses buy and sell energy, metals and other commodities that people use every day. Trading is fast and furious. About a thousand transactions take place every minute. But when it comes to oil, the traders are not buying and selling actual oil. They are buying and selling contracts called futures contracts, which are agreements to accept delivery of oil in the future at a price set in the present.”
“That sounds simple enough,” Miles said.
I glanced at Nash. He was uneasily scanning the horizon, presumably looking for pursuers, cops, or anyone else we wanted to steer clear of.
Cameron glanced back at Miles. “It’s not too complicated. It’s basically just a bet on the future price of oil. Where it gets complicated is when all these other traders, called speculators, jump in. They’re not interested in the actual oil. They’re only interested in making bets on other people’s bets. There are so many of them that less than one percent of crude oil and gasoline physically changes hands as a result of the buying and selling of all these contracts. The speculators could care less about the actual oil. They’re just interested in betting on which direction the market will go. They buy the futures contracts intending to sell them before the actual oil gets delivered. They hope that if they bet right, they can cash out on the deal. Buy low, sell high. See?”
“I guess,” Miles said.
“Theoretically,” Cameron continued, “speculators are good for the market because they inject a lot of dough into it. A lot of cash keeps the market healthy. The problem is, excessive speculation can really inflate the price of oil. So if I release a program that makes it look like a lot of speculation is happening, the market would react and the price of oil would go up.”
“Is that what your virus did?” I asked.
Cameron nodded. “Kind of. Only in reverse.”
“All right,” Nash said. “But the NYMEX is regulated by the government. Eventually they’ll find the source of the computer program, you’ll go to jail, and the market would correct itself. You’re not worried about that at all?”