Butterfly's Dream (1)
Seo Minjae stared at Lee Jaseung with an expression of pure disbelief.
What the hell did I just hear?
Lee Jaseung might be the type who refused to keep cash in hand, and among chaebols he was certainly one of the more extravagant, but still—
"……You're going to spend five trillion won?"
"Roughly that much."
"What are you buying that needs five trillion?"
Then it hit him—Jaseung had been obsessing over AI lately.
"An AI company? But there isn't a single AI startup worth five trillion won."
Watching Seo Minjae tilt his head in confusion, Lee Jaseung let out a quiet chuckle.
In the AI industry, there were three things Jaseung was after: software, hardware, and the ecosystem.
I've already secured the software. Now it's time to take the hardware.
For that, he needed five trillion. The problem was that he only had a hundred billion on hand.
Seo Minjae pointed out the exact same issue.
"You know our assets under management are only a hundred billion, right? To turn a hundred billion into five trillion, you'd need a…… five-thousand-percent return."
"I'm going to use leverage."
"Leverage?"
Even the most aggressive derivatives maxed out at around twenty times. Jaseung had to know that.
Ah.
Seo Minjae let out a small sound of realization.
There was one place in the financial markets where leverage could be pushed to absurd heights.
"FX?"
Lee Jaseung gave a slight nod of affirmation.
The foreign exchange market was like the ocean itself—stable, with low volatility. Stocks routinely moved three to five percent in a single day; FX rarely budged even one percent. That very stability was what made extreme leverage possible.
"How much leverage do brokers offer in the forex market?"
"Fifty times is standard. Mix in options strategies and you can push it to a hundred. There are lunatics who take it to four hundred, but……"
Seo Minjae added firmly, as if forbidding the thought entirely.
"……That's basically suicide."
"Don't worry. I'll keep it conservative."
"How much, then?"
"Fifty times."
He was really only taking the baseline. It was so conservative that Seo Minjae found himself puzzled instead.
A guy who wants to turn a hundred billion into five trillion is playing it this safe? He's got another card up his sleeve, doesn't he?
Indeed he did.
The reason Lee Jaseung had chosen "safe" leverage was because he intended to throw himself into a storm-tossed sea.
"I'll put fifty-times leverage into the yen-dollar market."
"……"
The yen-dollar market was a deep and vast ocean—more than a trillion dollars in daily volume. Half of Korea's GDP traded hands in a single day. An enormous scale. And more than anything—
"You know Japan's trying to drive down the value of the yen, right?"
With the Japanese government recently announcing unlimited quantitative easing, a massive yen decline had already been priced into the market.
"I know. That's exactly why I chose the yen-dollar market."
This wouldn't be an ordinary decline, either.
Having seen the exact numbers from the future, Lee Jaseung spoke with complete calm.
"The yen index is going to crash by twenty percent. Perfect conditions for a short."
"Twenty percent?"
Seo Minjae sucked in a sharp breath. It simply didn't seem believable. Even the financial sector was only forecasting a drop of around ten percent at most.
"When the U.S. did large-scale QE, the dollar only fell about ten percent. If the yen drops twenty, neighboring countries will push back hard."
"This time the speculative capital will help. Securities firms' performance has been terrible lately, hasn't it?"
Seo Minjae thought of the endless complaints he'd been hearing—in the break room, the elevators, the smoking areas—all those voices thick with sighs.
"It's bad. Even worse for us in the global division. Last year the European fiscal crisis had everyone talking about defaults. Same story in the U.S. Markets froze solid worldwide."
"And in the middle of that, Japan's prime minister openly declared he would crash the yen. It's his very first policy after taking office. He's saying he'll push it through no matter what."
The government itself was stepping in to devalue the yen. As a first policy, there was zero chance of a reverse. It was practically an advertisement: Come short us here.
And the forex market offered high leverage on top of that.
So where would traders desperate for performance flock?
"They're all going to pile into the yen-dollar market."
"The government will engineer a ten-percent decline through policy, and then global speculative capital will stampede in and shove it down another ten. A shorting gale will blow."
Yen shorts would become the financial trend of the moment. From heavyweight hedge funds like Ray Dalio and George Soros all the way down to mid- and small-sized funds, everyone would dive in to catch a once-in-a-lifetime insane event.
But still.
"Will a twenty-percent drop be enough?"
Seo Minjae flinched and stared at Lee Jaseung.
What the hell is this bastard saying now?
"Hey. Hey. Don't even joke about that. Twenty percent is already a massive crash."
Of course Lee Jaseung didn't listen with even half an ear. He propped his chin on his hand and sank into thought.
A hundred billion at fifty-times leverage gives me a five-trillion-won position. A twenty-percent drop only nets me one trillion in profit. But my target is five trillion. I need to enlarge the board.
A shorting wind was about to blow across the world.
But a single flap of a butterfly's wings could turn that wind into a storm.
"Maybe I'll try playing the butterfly."
Seo Minjae looked him up and down, then answered with a dubious look.
"……You? A butterfly?"
Satonomics.
Prime Minister Sato's announced yen-depreciation policy.
Lee Jaseung recalled the future.
That policy turned the yen-dollar market into the financial industry's playground. By itself it dropped the yen's value twenty percent.
That was the baseline figure.
Now, add a variable.
What if all of Korea became the butterfly?
Finance, chaebols, media, individual investors—four wings moving as one body to create a variable. Just how far would the yen fall then?
He was curious. Time to run a simulation.
Introduce a variable, then check the results in the future at dawn on Friday. If it wasn't satisfactory, add another variable.
Until he held five trillion in his hands.
Let's start with the first variable.
Finance itself.
Nowhere does rumor travel faster than Yeouido. Plant it properly in one place and it'll spread everywhere in no time.
Especially in a period this starved for performance.
As always after meeting Lee Jaseung, Seo Minjae's mind was clouded with unresolved questions.
A five-thousand-percent return? Is that even possible? How is he going to pull it off?
He had already heard the answer to "how."
Jaseung had requested three missions. The problem was that the contents of those missions made no sense.
Can just doing these things really produce a five-thousand-percent return?
Then, suddenly, a hollow laugh slipped out of him.
What am I even thinking right now?
In the old days, the moment someone said five thousand percent he would have snapped, "Don't talk bullshit." Now his first reaction was "How are you going to do it?"
My common sense is calibrating itself to Lee Jaseung. Tch. This is dangerous.
But he was starting to look forward to it.
Jaseung always had a way of exceeding expectations. This time too, he would pull it off in a way no one could imagine.
Just focus on the missions he'd been given.
The first was designing the fund structure.
Creating a fund was obvious. Raising several hundred billion in investment capital and then growing it to five trillion was far more realistic than trying to multiply a hundred billion into five trillion by itself.
The problem was the structure Jaseung had demanded.
We're going custom this time. Design me a structured product.
Custom how?
On paper, make the leverage look like ten times. In reality, design it so it's fifty.
Safe on the outside, dangerous on the inside. It would require financial engineering. Seo Minjae went looking for the specialists.
The Structured Products desk of the Global Division.
This was where the derivatives architects worked, and under normal circumstances Seo Minjae had almost no contact with them.
"Oh? Managing Director Seo. What brings you here?"
Director Lee looked awkward at the sight of him, yet couldn't quite hide a flicker of anticipation. He had recently watched Seo Minjae hand off good deals to other departments.
"Makers is preparing a large-scale investment. We need product design."
Director Lee's eyes lit up.
Makers?
He had heard that a deal Lee Jaseung reviewed had gone into the alternative investments team. Rumor said it was a Silicon Valley startup that had been making waves.
Maybe me too?
Hoping privately, Director Lee asked, "What kind of product?"
"A yen derivative. Fundamentally it's a structure that takes a short position on yen-dollar futures."
Seo Minjae laid out the materials he had prepared and began explaining. Director Lee reviewed the contents with a serious expression.
"Hmm. I understand the basic structure. How much leverage are you thinking of setting?"
"That's the sensitive part. On paper we want it to look like around ten times, but in reality……"
"In reality?"
"We're going to use a swap structure to push it up to fifty times."
Director Lee whistled.
Given the current volatility in the yen-dollar market, fifty times was aggressive.
"Fifty times. You realize that if the yen moves just two percent against you, the principal is gone, right?"
"Makers is certain the yen is going to fall substantially."
Director Lee asked the critical question.
"How far do they expect it to fall? We need a base scenario to design the product."
This was exactly the second mission.
Spread the yen-crash theory through the financial sector.
Seo Minjae put on a troubled look and lowered his voice.
"Director, this is genuine client confidentiality. I really shouldn't be speaking about it casually."
"Come on, we need at least some idea to design this. It'll stay with me only."
Seo Minjae was certain the information would be all over Yeouido before lunch was over. Without a word, he drew a V with his fingers.
"Two? Don't tell me…… twenty percent?"
A nod.
Shock spread across Director Lee's face.
"Isn't that far too extreme? Twenty percent?"
"Representative Lee Jaseung said speculative capital is going to move in force. To some degree it's the effect the Japanese government intends."
Director Lee understood immediately.
The speculators would thrash the yen for them. It was the perfect opportunity for the Japanese government to drive the currency down hard without wearing the label of currency manipulator.
That actually makes sense. And if the source is Makers……
The Facenote short, the natural gas war—whenever Makers took a view against market consensus, their hit rate was a perfect hundred percent. And Seo Minjae himself had been a direct beneficiary. PBS's strong quarterly numbers this quarter were thanks to exactly that.
I want some of that trickle-down effect too!
When he lifted his head, greed was written all over his face.
"Then would it be all right if I used this information to create a yen-short product and sell it to our clients? We'll leave Makers' name out of it and present it as our own analysis."
Seo Minjae cheered internally.
It aligned perfectly with the third mission Lee Jaseung had given him: Get the financial sector selling yen-short products.
And the other side had proposed it first. Perfect.
Outwardly, however, he put on a worried expression.
"I don't know…… isn't that a bit dangerous? If it moves against the forecast……"
"Come on, it's not like we started this job yesterday. We'll handle the risk management ourselves. And honestly, we can't just let an opportunity like this slip by. If our desk makes product revenue off it, we'll cut you a share of the commissions, Managing Director."
"Well, if you're offering that…… But you really do have to be careful. Don't set the leverage too high. Keep it moderate, understood?"
"Got it, got it! Turns out you're a real worrywart! Anyway, thanks for the good intel. If anything else like this comes up, please pass it along."
"Of course. We have to help each other."
Seo Minjae turned away with a broad grin.
And so the butterfly's first wing was complete.
The seed planted at Seoseong Securities grew thick and fast.
Securities firms began debating yen-decline hedge strategies and started manufacturing and selling short products.
A few weeks later, in the early hours of a Friday.
I stepped into the future. I needed to see what results the variables I had sown had produced.
Han Juhyeong was screaming.
"Aaaagh, fuck!! The exchange rate went up again!"
Working beautifully.
Han Juhyeong, who treated Makers like his personal bamboo forest for venting, roared on.
"In half a year the exchange rate has risen twenty-two percent. Does that even make sense? Because of this we've lost a massive chunk of North American market share to Japanese cars! That Sato bastard is a real fucking psycho!! This is currency manipulation!"
Found it.
A more lethal variable. A more powerful catalyst.
Who would be the angriest people in the world when the yen crashed?
Export companies across the globe that competed with Japan.
Same quality, but only Japanese cars were now twenty percent cheaper.
I smiled faintly.
"Then do you want to short it with me?"
※ This work is a work of fiction. All persons, groups, place names, and events appearing in the story are fictitious and have no connection to any real-world counterparts. Specialized knowledge described herein has also been reconstructed and adapted for the story and may differ from actual information.