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9cbde13
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The only thing any of us can do completely on our own is to have the start of a good idea.
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Michael Lewis |
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d68f871
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rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine
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Michael Lewis |
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c16f256
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Complicated financial stuff was being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it.
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Michael Lewis |
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0ed9412
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I really do believe the final act in play is a crisis in our financial institutions, which are doing such dumb, dumb things,
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Michael Lewis |
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b002196
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Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system...Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said. "The prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules can be found" in an article written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [in 1985], Tremonti said yesterday at Milan's Cattolica University. --Bloomberg News, November 20, 2008"
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Michael Lewis |
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aec220d
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Once very smart people are paid huge sums of money to exploit the flaws in the financial system, they have the spectacularly destructive incentive to screw the system up further, or to remain silent as they watch it being screwed up by others. The cost, in the end, is a tangled-up financial system. Untangling it requires acts of commercial heroism--and even then the fix might not work. There was simply too much more easy money to be made by..
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Michael Lewis |
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31da12a
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Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice.
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Michael Lewis |
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90b1dde
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He gave a talk in which he argued that the way they measured risk was completely idiotic. They measured risk by volatility: how much a stock or bond happened to have jumped around in the past few years. Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions.
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Michael Lewis |
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9be0cc8
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The great thing about baseball players, from the point of view of personal hygiene, is how seldom they break a sweat.
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Michael Lewis |
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7967050
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The author refers to a player's affected nonchalance and comments he is, "too young to realize you are what you pretend to be."
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mentality
vision
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Michael Lewis |
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4005b5e
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If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives. FedEx couldn't get its night shift to finish on time; they tried everything to speed it up but nothing worked--until they stopped paying night shift workers by the hour and started to pay them by the shift. Xerox created a new, better machine only to have it sell less well than the inferior older ones--until they figured out the salesmen..
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Michael Lewis |
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e014cb5
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Confirmation bias," he'd heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. "Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don't even realize it is happening," he said. A scout would settle on an opinion about a player and then arrange the evidence to support that opinion. "The"
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Michael Lewis |
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0a0f7e7
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Because the lenders sold many--though not all--of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry was also fraught with moral hazard. "It was a fast-buck business," says Jacobs. "Any business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people."
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recession
wall-street
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Michael Lewis |
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a1d7075
|
The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all of your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest). Maybe the best definition of "investing" is "gambling with the odds in your favor."
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Michael Lewis |
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25e0a70
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Wall Street investment banks are like Las Vegas casinos: They set the odds. The customer who plays zero-sum games against them may win from time to time but never systematically, and never so spectacularly that he bankrupts the casino.
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Michael Lewis |
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95201d5
|
First base was a far richer social opportunity. First base made catching feeling like a bad dinner party - what with the ump hanging on your shoulder and all the fans and cameras staring at you. At first base you could really talk.
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Michael Lewis |
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6a95dcc
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Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places.
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Michael Lewis |
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499590d
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But the more rural the American, the more dependent he is for his way of life on the U.S. government. And the more rural the American, the more likely he was to have voted for Donald Trump. So you might think that Trump, when he took office, would do everything he could to strengthen and grow the little box marked "Rural Development." That's not what has happened."
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Michael Lewis |
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fccdf12
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You want loyalty, hire a cocker spaniel.
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Michael Lewis |
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fcd1f82
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Dont worry about where i am , i'll let you know when i get there .
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Michael Lewis |
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d24ba01
|
One of the reasons Wall Street had cooked up this new industry called structured finance was that its old-fashioned business was every day less profitable. The profits in stockbroking, along with those in the more conventional sorts of bond broking, had been squashed by Internet competition.
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Michael Lewis |
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431c2d5
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In the red southern states the mayor sometimes would say," Can you not mention that the government gave this?"
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Michael Lewis |
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a6266dd
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It is the innovation that never occurs, and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.
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Michael Lewis |
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20ac08e
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The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago.
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Michael Lewis |
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bf87ded
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It's taboo," he said. "When they ask you why you want to be an investment banker, you're supposed to talk about the challenges, and the thrill of doing deals, and the excitement of working with such high-calibre people, but never, ever mention money."
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Michael Lewis |
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2e7733a
|
The first thing you learn on the trading floor is that when large numbers of people are after the same commodity, be it a stock, a bond, or a job, the commodity quickly becomes overvalued.
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Michael Lewis |
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901c159
|
They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out, "It's really hard to know when you're lucky and when you're smart."
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cornwall-capital
credit-default-swaps
james-mai
subprime-mortgage-bonds
recession
wall-street
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Michael Lewis |
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31a330f
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Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior removed from their websites the links to climate change data. The USDA removed the inspection reports of businesses accused of animal abuse by the government. The new acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney, said he wanted to end public access to records of consumer complaints against financial institutions. Two weeks after Hurricane M..
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Michael Lewis |
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140529c
|
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. --Sun-tzu
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Michael Lewis |
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f1afc5a
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The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings, made it "quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders."
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Michael Lewis |
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55659f2
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That was the reason the casino bothered to list the wheel's most recent spins: to help gamblers to delude themselves.
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Michael Lewis |
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5745634
|
The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is as early as fifty-five for men and fifty for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than six hundred Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, writers, musicians, and on and on and on."
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Michael Lewis |
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42a19ce
|
The "consumer loan" piles that Wall Street firms, led by Goldman Sachs, asked AIG FP to insure went from being 2 percent subprime mortgages to being 95 percent subprime mortgages. In a matter of months, AIG FP, in effect, bought $50 billion in triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds by insuring them against default." --
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Michael Lewis |
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78fa2e3
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With stagnant wages and booming consumption, the cash-strapped American masses had a virtually unlimited demand for loans but an uncertain ability to repay them.
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Michael Lewis |
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fc24924
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People no longer are responsible for what happens in the market, because computers make all the decisions.
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Michael Lewis |
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d3f0698
|
When banking stops, credit stops, and when credit stops, trade stops, and when trade stops--well, the city of Chicago had only eight days of chlorine on hand for its water supply. Hospitals ran out of medicine. The entire modern world was premised on the ability to buy now and pay later.
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Michael Lewis |
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b6516f1
|
How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation?
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Michael Lewis |
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bdbe8fc
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Only someone who has Asperger's would read a subprime mortgage bond prospectus,
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Michael Lewis |
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9b4d61f
|
The creation of the mortgage bond market, a decade earlier, had extended Wall Street into a place it had never before been: the debts of ordinary Americans.
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mortgage-bonds
recession
wall-street
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Michael Lewis |
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97e35af
|
I'd thought it strange, after the financial crisis, in which Goldman had played such an important role, that the only Goldman Sachs employee who had been charged with any sort of crime was the employee who had taken something from Goldman Sachs.
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Michael Lewis |
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f6467ff
|
The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became--though even to use words like "corrupt" and "sinister" made serious people uncomfortable, and so Brad avoided them."
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Michael Lewis |
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275eeef
|
not because he had the slightest interest in God but because he was curious about its internal contradictions.
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Michael Lewis |
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1c16036
|
After the meeting, RBC conducted a study, never released publicly, in which they found that more than two hundred SEC staffers since 2007 had left their government jobs to work for high-frequency trading firms or the firms that lobbied Washington
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Michael Lewis |
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5c045ba
|
The politicians in Ireland speak Gaelic the way the Real Housewives of Orange County speak French.
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Michael Lewis |