Though he had a private office upstairs, Meriwether usually sat on the trading floor, at a tiny desk squeezed in with the others. He would chain-smoke while doing Eurodollar trades, and supervise the professors by asking probing questions. Somehow, he sheathed great ambition in an affecting modesty. He liked to say that he never hired anyone who wasn’t smarter than he was. He didn’t talk about himself, but no one noticed because he was genuinely interested in what the others were doing. He didn’t build the models, but he grasped what the models were saying. And he trusted the models because
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