Bane's Plan to Bankrupt Batman Doesn't Make Any Sense. What is Batman Rises telling us with its predictive programming???

Predictive programming is a subtle form of psychological conditioning provided by the media to acquaint the public with planned societal changes to be implemented by our leaders. If and when these changes are put through, the public will already be familiarized with them and will accept them as 'natural progressions', as Alan Watt calls it; thus lessening any possible public resistance and commotion.

If you're watching superhero movies for financial advice, you're probably in trouble. If you're watching The Dark Knight Rises for financial advice, you're probably in worse trouble. Especially if you're looking for ways to sabotage your enemy's finances, like Batman's nemesis Bane.

So, for all the would-be super-villains out there, let me strongly recommend that you skip the final act of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy. Instead, let's take a moment and talk about why Bane's financial subterfuge is so unnecessarily risky -- if only as a reference for everyone out there with designs on taking over the world. (Disclaimer: If you haven't seen The Dark Knight Rises and don't like spoilers -- and really, who likes spoilers? -- you should stop reading. You have been warned).

You might think that a terrorist able to hold an entire metropolis hostage for half a year would be a stickler for details. You would be wrong. Time and again, Bane leaves things to chance. First, there's the small matter of not killing Batman when given the opportunity -- to draw out his suffering, of course. That's just a de rigueur super-villain mistake. But Bane's hit on the Gotham stock exchange is less understandable. Remember, the point was to leave Bruce Wayne destitute so he'd have to turn to a financial white knight -- who would turn out to not be such a white knight -- to keep Wayne Enterprises and its fusion reactor out of the hands of Bane's corporate benefactor.

So far, so good. 

But how does Bane impoverish Batman? Step one involves hijacking the entire Gotham stock exchange. Step two is breaking into Wayne's personal account directly from the exchange. Step three has something to do with buying lots of puts that expire at midnight on futures. And the fourth step is, of course, profit. Well, not for Bruce Wayne.

Let's count the way this doesn't make sense. As my colleague Jordan Weissmann and I discussed, none of the above steps come close to anything resembling verisimilitude. Trading would almost certainly stop once the attack on the stock exchange started. And if trades did go through, they would probably be canceled afterward. Nor would Bane need to hook into the exchange to trade under Wayne's name.

But the biggest question is why in God's name would Bane buy puts for Wayne? A quick refresher: Puts are contracts that protect the buyer against losses. They entitle the buyer to sell something at a certain price -- the strike price -- by a certain date. For example, say a stock is at 100 and you buy puts on that stock with a strike price of 90 for the next six months. If the price drops below 90 any time over that period, you can still sell it for 90. So why would Bane buy options that protect Wayne against losses when Bane's assault would almost certainly cause huge losses? Presumably because Bane used Wayne's money to buy waaaaaaaaay out-of-the-money puts. In other words, the strike price was very, very low -- something like 70 in our above example. Markets would have to completely collapse for the the puts to pay off. 

But what if they did? Investors would panic big time after a strike on the stock exchange itself. If the panic was big enough, Bruce Wayne's billions would seem like a relative pittance compared to his new riches. Puts that far out of the money are quite cheap -- so even a modest payout on a single contract would be multiplied many, many times over. Of course, this assumes that the exchange would extend the expiration on the puts for as long as markets were closed. But that's a safer assumption than anything Bane figured.

There's a much easier way to do this. Bane could have just used Wayne's money to buy calls. They're the opposite of puts. They entitle the buyer to buy something at a certain price -- the strike price -- by a certain date. In plain English, they're a bet that prices will go up. Given that Bane's attack would send stocks swooning, there's no chance the calls would have paid off.

Oh, and one last pro tip. Never assume you've broken Batman.

 

Is the Batman stock market heist possible?

here’s a basic outline of the scene: Bane, Batman’s nemesis in the movie, attacks Gotham Stock Exchange with a bunch of armed flunkies. Bane coerces a trader into unlocking his terminal, and then uses Bruce Wayne’s fingerprints (which he obtained earlier) to bet all of Wayne Enterprises’ stock on bad futures. The futures don’t pan out (obviously), and the next morning his company is bankrupt. The feds try to interrupt the heist by cutting the stock exchange’s wired connection, but there’s a backup wireless link that the baddies use instead.

There are two key points that don’t quite ring true, which we will investigate the veracity of:

1. Can you simply walk into a stock exchange and execute a bunch of trades?
2. Does a stock exchange only have one or two links to the outside world? Is it easy to cut them?

To begin with, let’s assume that Gotham Stock Exchange is modeled on the New York Stock Exchange. The scene in the movie is shot at the NYSE on Wall Street — but more importantly, the comic’s creators have admitted that Gotham is based on New York City. <<<<coincidance?? no.

The first point, as far as we can tell, is true. There are certainly computers at the New York Stock Exchange that allow you to execute trades, or deal in futures. A stock broker — i.e. someone authorized to act on behalf of a stock holder — could sell all of Bruce Wayne’s stock, if he wanted. We don’t know if fingerprints are actually used at the NYSE (it could just be a password), but presumably this is Bane’s way of authorizing himself as a legit stock broker.

As for “cutting the hard line,” it’s a little bit harder to get exact information on the NYSE’s connectivity. It sounds like the NYSE is connected to other stock exchanges via the Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure (SFTI), which is a private network of high-speed (up to 10Gbps) fiber links. Most cables are pulled through ducting that is fairly easy to access — so as long as you know where the cables run (quick, phone the network admin!) it shouldn’t be too hard to cut them.

I doubt that the NYSE has a redundant wireless link. If we assume the wireless connection is local to the building in Wall Street, which is fairly squat, then it must be a satellite link — which doesn’t have the capacity or latency to be a viable connection for market trading. It’s possible that the NYSE has a short-range wireless link to another nearby building — but then you could simply cut the hard line that feeds into that building.

Finally, it’s important to bear in mind that every action on the stock market is logged. Every time you buy or sell a security of some description, there is a digital paper trail. There has never been a real-world stock market heist like the one in Batman, but I suspect it would be easy enough to reverse the fraudulent transactions. It is also possible for stock markets to initiate a trading curb if the market suddenly drops in value. In the US, “circuit breakers” were introduced after Black Monday to prevent any future catastrophic market crashes.

So, is it possible?

In short, yes, if you can gain entry to a stock exchange — hopefully by bypassing security, rather than force — you could pull off a similar heist. In reality, due to the ease in which a stock exchange can be shut down, and the digital paper trail, you are unlikely to get away with it. It would be far more effective (i.e. less traceable) to commit the theft slowly, over a longer period of time — and historically that’s exactly what rogue traders, such as Nick Leeson at Barings Bank, have done.

In other Batman-related physics trivia, a bunch of British university students have calculated whether Batman’s cape is actually large enough to perform a bat-glide. I would spoil it, but you can probably work out the answer yourself.