A vote held within hours of a major crisis breaking, without enough time for anyone to sit back and ask what it really meant, how serious it really was, how bad it was going to get. An election in the grip of panic. The headlines that morning had been unbelievable. Markets were falling. The press was hysterical.Knowles spent the day in meetings with his economic advisors and senior Republican politicians and on the phone to foreign leaders. Markets were taking a hit around the globe and the confidence laboriously reconstructed in the wake of the Chinese disturbances of 2014 was evaporating as if it had never returned. He gave the same message to all the foreign leaders he spoke to. Fidelian was an isolated instance. The system was sound. Once the markets saw that, the decline would be arrested. He needed them to give that message to their own countries. The more united they could be in rejecting the idea that this was another 2008, the sooner this crisis would start to resolve.But that would do nothing to halt the bloodbath that was being perpetrated in voting booths across the nation that day.
