Nosferatu
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Known to followers of the Good Man as the Dark Lord of the Swaps, Nosferatu was a Romanian noble, born Vlad Paripasu, exiled from his family office, headquartered high in the Carpathian mountains, at the top of a winding road not far from Făgăraș after he fell out with his King, Mutatis, as a youth. He travelled without rest for forty days and forty nights, across the European feudal lands, eventually finding shelter and company with a remote marauding band of Lanchmani from the gallic city of Salomoné of in the wild woods of Bretton, where he met and befriended Saxon warlord Reg Margin, inadvertently sending him to his death at the hands of some renegade Synthæse.
He — or it — was was accursed, doomed to roam the financial landscape laying waste to the unwary and hubristic until the great day of summary judgment. If there was a monetary disaster, you could be sure he was there. His is a long and magnificent history, first clearing Transylvanian futures for the Medicis and Rothschilds, only to meet a sticky end when tulip mania finally broke in 1637. But, miraculously, the Dark Lord was short. He was Mr. Arthur Anderson, an accounting consultant in 1998. He was on the Nobel committee who awarded its economic prize to Black and Scholes. He was Jericho Moody, whose agency assessed financial instruments. He was Marc du Marquette, convenor of the original Financial Accounting Standards Board.
He — I mean it — then disappeared again, but is rumoured to have been long cultivating an undead army of phantom ISDAs who lie upon the dead earth as spores, and the prophecies of the Good Man make plain will, in a sign of the forthcoming day of summary judgment, once again rise up and lay unholy waste to the Godless capital markets of the world.
If you find a chap with Arthur Andersen, Enron, Lehman and MF Global on his CV, don’t call him Lucky. Call him Phantom der Nacht.
The ISDA Protocol
Also, reflected in the Romanian, a nascent character in Hunter Barkley’s The ISDA Protocol, a kind of less-than human spirit force representing conflict, weakness of agency and the unshakeable conviction in the truth of, models, accounting and data who had, in its time, gripped Enron, Lehman, LTCM, the entire world.