The Phoenix Agenda Trilogy

The Phoenix Agenda Trilogy is a story in three parts. Like all good stories it begins with an idea – what if you could play the market in a way to use the greed of the players against them destroying Wall Street and gaining control, at least on paper, of the richest and most successful international companies for pennies on the dollar, thus Book 1: The Ancient and Honorable Society of the Phoenix, begins the tale. Like all good ideas, it leads to many unintended consequences for the players and for the played, and of course all of us ordinary people who must live with the effects, this is the second act, Book 2, The Phoenix Storm. Before the hero and heroine can find a way forward, they must surmount obstacles, the reluctant plotters now facing the reality of what they started, a Russian Civil war, rescuing a man from a Russian prison, disarming a nuclear bomb in countdown before it destroys St. Petersburg, and reaching a mountain top Swiss hotel in time to regain control of ownership of the world’s great companies in order to finish the plan and save the world economy from the next Great Depression. And in the third act, like in all good stories, the heroes of the play find a way to turn the bad into good, and we all live happily ever after with the result, Book 3, Recovery and Rebirth. Or do we, for there is also a post-script for every good idea has a problem, but this will be left to some future story yet to be written.

The author began the writing of the story fifty years ago during the first of the modern day global financial crises – the advent of the OPEC Cartel and their sudden quadrupling of the price of crude oil creating a massive problem for rich and poor nations alike, working in Geneva, Switzerland for the United Nations. 

The initial story was inspired by the success of another economist turned novelist – Paul Erdman (The Billions Dollar Sure Things, The Silver Bears, etc.).  

Why Trump’s victory and the forced shutdown of the US and world economy with all its negative effects on supply chains was a perfect opportunity to revise the story in a major way. It was not that Donald Trump had not figured in the earliest drafts of the novel, he was there in the persona of Ben Masters, the New York real estate developer who put his name on all his buildings, and whose portfolio of prime properties were a set-up for a massive default, Trump had been a major part of the story once it was rewritten in the early 1980’s. That was the “standard” Donald Trump that the author knew from his years living and working in New York, the ever-bankrupt promoter with a massive ego and his name on all his properties, but this new Trump, Trump the incompetent President was something new, interesting, even frightening, and he was having a dire impact on the economy and the country that needed to be analyzed.  A fictional President Trump and the massive economic disruption of the pandemic and his failures, was a good vehicle for exploration of what might come next for the United States, the stock market, and the world economy. 

The trilogy is being offered in a single massive volume as well as in the three smaller bites because perhaps someday someone will see it for what it really is – a discussion of the economic ups and downs of the past two decades starting with the financial panic of 2007-09 and ending with the massive efforts to get the US and world economy started after the pandemic shutdowns and the failures of the Congress and the Trump administration to do enough to rebuild the small and medium companies – the shops and restaurants – that are the heart and soul of Main Street America and were damaged severely by the pandemic. The three books, taken together show in fictional form, written in the vernacular of a political-economic thriller, is a vision of how modern-day managerial capitalism based on the original economic paradigm that Adam Smith laid out in the 18th century of self-interest and greed as the organizational principles of markets, might be changed into something better suited to deal with the problems of climate change and massive social and wealth inequality we now face in the 21st century.

David Blond, International Economist, MA, Ph.D.

Resume: MA, Ph.D. NYU 1969-1973, Business International, New York, 1973-74; UNCTAD, Geneva, Switzerland, 1974-78; Office of the Secretary of Defense, Washington, D.C., 1978-85; Data Resources, Inc., Washington, D.C., 1985-1995; ICF-Kaiser, Fairfax, Virginia, 1995-96; The Columbus Group, Fairfax, Virginia, 1996-1997; Merge Global, Arlington, Virginia, 1997-2003; QuERI-International, Washington, Santa Fe, Denver, 2003 – Present (www.queriinternational.com).