In afternoon trading, Treasury bonds eased a bit as the Dow Jones industrial average surged 3.3percentt and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index rose 2.6percentt.
More ominous was the silence from Cantor Fitzgerald & Company, the leading brokerage firm in trading Treasury bonds, which was based on the upper floors of 1 World Trade Center.
Palm Beach stock promoter Robert Colgin Wilson was running a Ponzi scheme: promising extraordinarily high returns by trading Treasury securities, but siphoning off funds into private offshore accounts.
The country's central bank spends about $200m a week to keep the local currency, the naira, stable; banks acting as trading houses get fat on trading treasury bills and "round-tripping" between the naira's official and black market rates.
When Mr. Coughlin was not trading treasury securities at Cantor Fitzgerald, golfing, or taking his children -- Ryann, 4, Sean, 2, and Riley, 9 months old -- to the carousel in Central Park, he was planning social gatherings.
