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f55fc65
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The markets were now run by technology, but the technologists were still treated like tools. Nobody bothered to explain the business to them, but they were forced to adapt to its demands and exposed to its failures--which was, perhaps, why there had been so many more conspicuous failures.
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Michael Lewis |
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f008845
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We tried to trademark proximity, but you can't because it's a word,
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Michael Lewis |
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8961776
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Someone out there was using the fact that stock market orders arrived at different times at different exchanges to front-run orders from one market to another.
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Michael Lewis |
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9002324
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The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value.
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Michael Lewis |
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13d6803
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There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, "It's impossible to know for sure." "What will the price of oil be in ten years?" was such a question. That didn't mean you gave up trying to find an answer; you just couched that answer in probabilistic terms."
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Michael Lewis |
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d29556f
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Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called hidden people--or, to put it more plainly, elves--in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour ..
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Michael Lewis |
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f99b1ac
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if you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.
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Michael Lewis |
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08993e9
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TWO THINGS STRIKE every Irish person when he comes to America, Irish friends tell me: the vastness of the country, and the seemingly endless desire of its people to talk about their personal problems. Two things strike an American when he comes to Ireland: how small it is, and how tight-lipped. An Irish person with a personal problem takes it into a hole with him, like a squirrel with a nut before winter. He tortures himself and sometimes h..
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Michael Lewis |
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6440d4e
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I'm now convinced that the worst thing a man can do with a telephone without breaking the law is to call someone he doesn't know and try to sell that person something he doesn't want.
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Michael Lewis |
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4652981
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For a lot of the players it was their first exposure to the Southern female - the most flagrant cheater in the mutual disarmament pact known as feminism. Lipstick! Hairdos! Submissiveness!
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Michael Lewis |
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9abc7c1
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No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo.
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Michael Lewis |
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4b9549f
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Anti-intellectual resentment is common in all of American life and it has many diverse expressions. Refusing to draft college players might have been one of them. Bill James
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Michael Lewis |
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1d76ddf
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So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative. The
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Michael Lewis |
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e97f6a0
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It was striking how little control we had of events, particularly in view of how assiduously we cultivated the appearance of being in charge by smoking big cigars and saying fuck all the time.
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Michael Lewis |
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91da76a
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One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.
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Michael Lewis |
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5cbc93c
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why they studied economics, and they'd explain that it was the most practical course of study, even while they spent their time drawing funny little graphs.
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Michael Lewis |
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8e0872b
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He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.
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Michael Lewis |
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b9b9952
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The guy walks around with a banana in his ear. And people are like, 'Why do you have a banana in your ear?' He says, 'To keep the alligators away! There are no alligators! See?
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Michael Lewis |
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0b93065
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They actually spent time wondering how people who had been so sensationally right (i.e., they themselves) could preserve the capacity for diffidence and doubt and uncertainty that had enabled them to be right. The more sure you were of yourself and your judgment, the harder it was to find opportunities premised on the notion that you were, in the end, probably wrong. The
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Michael Lewis |
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8ea6d13
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Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don't know,
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Michael Lewis |
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f46a433
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On its surface, the booming market in side bets on subprime mortgage bonds seemed to be the financial equivalent of fantasy football: a benign, if silly, facsimile of investing. Alas, there was a difference between fantasy football and fantasy finance: When a fantasy football player drafts Peyton Manning to be on his team, he doesn't create a second Peyton Manning. When Mike Burry bought a credit default swap based on a Long Beach Savings s..
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goldman-sachs
mike-burry
subprime-mortgage-bonds
wall-street
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Michael Lewis |
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6871e7a
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After the war Avi, by then twenty-two years old, finally decided what he would study: psychology. Had you asked him just then why he picked psychology, "I would say I want to understand the human soul. Not the mind. The soul."
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Michael Lewis |
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c68882d
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The relationship between the people and their money in California is such that you can pluck almost any city at random and enter a crisis. San Jose has the highest per capita income of any city in the United States, after New York. It has the highest credit rating of any city in California with a population over 250,000. It is one of the few cities in America with a triple-A rating from Moody's and Standard & Poor's, but only because its bo..
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financial-crisis-of-2007-2010
ratings
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Michael Lewis |
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79817b9
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The entire health industry lies about what things cost to make," she said. "I know what things cost because I made them." --
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Michael Lewis |
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70b03ae
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The method of his execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man who played Mr. You're Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life.
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Michael Lewis |
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b05ba30
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The astute investor Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.
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Michael Lewis |
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956ebbc
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Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, which, upon inspection, proved to be a Washington, DC, propaganda machine funded with millions of dollars from ExxonMobil and Koch Industries. Pyle himself had served as a Koch Industries lobbyist and ran a business on the side writing editorials attacking the DOE's attempts to reduce the dependence of the American economy on carbon.
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Michael Lewis |
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d7b61b6
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the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it.
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Michael Lewis |
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8844675
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Trump's budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire--to remain ignorant.
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Michael Lewis |
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e36341e
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There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.
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Michael Lewis |
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1c2c34f
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Corporate finance, which services the corporations and governments that borrow money, and that are known as "clients," is, by comparison, a refined and unworldly place. Because they don't risk money, corporate financiers are considered wimps by traders."
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traders
wall-street
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Michael Lewis |
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06233c6
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Walking through the ruins, she saw all over again what she had seen so many times: how much better Americans were at responding to a disaster than preventing it.
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Michael Lewis |
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fe46314
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By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.
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Michael Lewis |
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c051c8b
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The way the creative process works is that .you first say something, and later, sometimes years later, you understand what you said.
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Michael Lewis |
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6f74130
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Donnie Green himself had been a trader at Salomon Brothers in the dark ages, when traders had more hair on their chests than on their heads.
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Michael Lewis |
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c3930c4
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Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification. Amos's
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Michael Lewis |
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6748f2c
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Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself.
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Michael Lewis |
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dfb1e5e
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The problems that had been Obama's problems for the past eight years were about to become Trump's problems. But his people didn't seem to want to know about them.
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government
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Michael Lewis |
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458c433
|
lot of that money went to big grain producers. The same Republican senators from farm states who said they abhorred government spending of almost any sort became radical socialists when the conversation turned to handouts to big grain producers. "The money follows the political power of the constituencies,"
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Michael Lewis |
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f492a1a
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He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.
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Michael Lewis |
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2d4e840
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Reg NMS was intended to create equality of opportunity in the U.S. stock market. Instead it institutionalized a more pernicious inequality. A small class of insiders with the resources to create speed were now allowed to preview the market and trade on what they had seen.
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Michael Lewis |
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ed6c023
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His life was dedicated to the fine art of tearing down and building anew.
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Michael Lewis |
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d205c14
|
There is nothing more satisfying to me," he said, "than to create a complete self-contained world when a computer is controlling it."
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Michael Lewis |
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b3006eb
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In something like an instant the man had changed his life. He reinvented his relationship to the world around him in a way that is considered normal only in California.
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Michael Lewis |