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1d126ec
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worth. A baseball team, of all things, was at the center of a story about the possibilities--and the limits--of reason in human affairs. Baseball--of all things--was an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method. As I say, I fell in love with a story. The story is about professional baseball and the people who play it. At its center is a man whose life was turned upside down by professiona..
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Michael Lewis |
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f1216ec
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Eisman was quick to see narratives, he explained the world in stories, and this was one of the stories he used to explain himself. The
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Michael Lewis |
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d0d058f
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From the end of 2005 until the middle of 2007, Wall Street firms created somewhere between $200 and $400 billion in subprime-backed CDOs: No
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Michael Lewis |
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f252f99
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The power of an imagination can arise from what it refuses to foresee.
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Michael Lewis |
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69eb105
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If it doesn't happen, it never was going to happen. If you never did it, it wasn't there to begin with.
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Michael Lewis |
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d8a0b5c
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There was one sure way, and only one sure way, to get ahead, and everyone with eyes in 1982 saw it: Major in economics; use your economics degree to get an analyst job on Wall Street; use your analyst job to get into the Harvard or Stanford Business School; and worry about the rest of your life later. So,
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Michael Lewis |
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9330974
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Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but only a few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion. --Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
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Michael Lewis |
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94c792b
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What do you mean there is no bathrobe in my suite??!!
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Michael Lewis |
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c9f8eb0
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The trouble, Danny suspected, was that "the understanding of numbers is so weak that they don't communicate anything. Everyone feels that those probabilities are not real--that they are just something on somebody's mind."
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Michael Lewis |
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591b117
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Knowledge is literally prediction," said Morey. "Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally"
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Michael Lewis |
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afc0d32
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You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything all at once. That's when you need to stop and check your thinking...Beware of the delirious guy in the emergency unit with the long history of alcoholism, because you will say, 'He's just drunk,' and you'll miss the subdural hematoma.
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redelmeier
pattern-recognition
decision-making
thinking
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Michael Lewis |
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09f7a72
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There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over-or undervalued, who couldn't? Bad as they may have been, the statistics us..
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Michael Lewis |
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e7db9ad
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National Sarcasm Society: Like We Need Your Support.
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Michael Lewis |
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7a72180
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Because metaphors are vivid and memorable, and because they are not readily subjected to critical analysis, they can have considerable impact on human judgment even when they are inappropriate, useless, or misleading," said Amos. "They replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up."
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Michael Lewis |
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4a59ca5
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The difference in Billy wasn't what had happened to him, but what hadn't. He had a life he hadn't led, and he knew it. He just hoped nobody else noticed.
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Michael Lewis |
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840145e
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After Gell-Man was done, Amos said, "You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are."
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Michael Lewis |
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b0c8a3a
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When someone says something, don't ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.
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Michael Lewis |
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f7cb619
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If a hurricane is another night in a bad marriage, a tornado is a blind date.
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Michael Lewis |
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a2daee9
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When the Goldman Sachs saleswoman called Mike Burry and told him that her firm would be happy to sell him credit default swaps in $100 million chunks, Burry guessed, rightly, that Goldman wasn't ultimately on the other side of his bets. Goldman would never be so stupid as to make huge naked bets that millions of insolvent Americans would repay their home loans. He didn't know who, or why, or how much, but he knew that some giant corporate e..
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credit-default-swap
goldman-sachs
mike-burry
subprime-mortgage-bonds
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Michael Lewis |
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1a4b8a9
|
When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,
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Michael Lewis |
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ef6e6f1
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At one point he turned to Christie and said, "Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves."
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Michael Lewis |
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4dc01d8
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People often work hard to obtain information they already have
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Michael Lewis |
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72dcf8b
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we are most often rewarded for punishing others, and punished for rewarding.
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Michael Lewis |
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39e305a
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A man who can tell a good story can make a good living as a broker.
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Michael Lewis |
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2aa8650
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The best decisions he has made in his life, he said, were completely unexpected, the ones that cut against convention. Then he went even further. He said that every decision he has forced himself to make because it was unexpected has been a good one.
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Michael Lewis |
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f717286
|
That was somewhere near the middle of a modern gold rush. Never before have so many unskilled twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time as we did this decade in New York and London.
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Michael Lewis |
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12921f7
|
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.
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Michael Lewis |
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4688c94
|
The final two words of his challenge, "no tears", meant that the loser was expected to suffer a great deal of pain, but wasn't entitled to whine, bitch or moan about it. He'd just have to hunker down and keep his poverty to himself."
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Michael Lewis |
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19a8c98
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The game has some of the feel of trading, just as jousting has some of the feel of war.
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Michael Lewis |
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394295f
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Wall Street makes its best producers into managers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made a manager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and often neurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers, and they go after each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts that producing gave them. They usually aren't well suited to be managers. Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another ..
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Michael Lewis |
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879a886
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some broker somewhere took out a handsome fee for himself, without necessarily doing much work.
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Michael Lewis |
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f513a55
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This conceit went hand in glove with the investment bankers' belief that they could control their destiny, which, as we shall see, they couldn't.
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Michael Lewis |
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848675e
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Why did investment banking pay so many people with so little experience so much money? Answer: When attached to a telephone, they could produce even more money. How could they produce money without experience? Answer: Producing in an investment bank was less a matter of skill and more a matter of intangibles--flair, persistence, and luck.
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Michael Lewis |
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449a517
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What was the secret to dealing with the assholes? "Lift weights or learn karate," said O'Grady."
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Michael Lewis |
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5e3644a
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The larger the number of people involved, the easier it was for them to delude themselves that what they were doing must be smart.
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Michael Lewis |
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74af489
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Making profits on Wall Street is a bit like eating the stuffing from a turkey. Some higher authority must first put the stuffing into the turkey. The turkey was stuffed more generously in the 1980s than ever before.
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Michael Lewis |
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4ed4cd6
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First, when all investors were doing the same thing, he would actively seek to do the opposite. The word stockbrokers use for this approach is contrarian. Everyone wants to be one, but no one is, for the sad reason that most investors are scared of looking foolish. Investors do not fear losing money as much as they fear solitude, by which I mean taking risks that others avoid. When they are caught losing money alone, they have no excuse for..
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Michael Lewis |
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d192cc6
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It said something about the ability of the free marketplace to mold people's behavior into a socially acceptable pattern. For this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive.
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Michael Lewis |
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35b9a53
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Had Volcker never pushed through his radical change in policy, the world would be many bond traders and one memoir the poorer.
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business-cycle
federal-reserve
interest-rates
money-supply
paul-volcker
bonds
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Michael Lewis |
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7978c20
|
Before Volcker's speech, bonds had been conservative investments, into which investors put their savings when they didn't fancy a gamble in the stock market. After Volcker's speech, bonds became objects of speculation, a means of creating wealth rather than merely storing it.
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business-cycle
federal-reserve
interest-rates
money-supply
paul-volcker
bonds
wall-street
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Michael Lewis |
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e2aab5d
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The difference between Strauss and Ranieri?" says one trader still at Salomon. "That's easy. Strauss wouldn't stoop to use the men's room on the trading floor. He'd go upstairs. Lewie would piss on your desk."
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lewie-ranieri
salomon-brothers
tom-strauss
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Michael Lewis |
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eef2df9
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If you are a self-possessed man with a healthy sense of detachment from your bank account and someone writes you a cheque for tens of millions of dollars you probably behave as if you have won a sweepstake, kicking your feet in the air and laughing yourself to sleep at night at the miracle of your good fortune. But if your sense of self-worth is morbidly wrapped up in your financial success you probably believe you deserve everything you ge..
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Michael Lewis |
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23ed210
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All good inventions come from something personal," she said. "People create things because it's personal." --
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Michael Lewis |
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223dde4
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The rapacity of companies with monopolistic power, and their ability to have their way with the government, got her thinking about the big American systems.
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Michael Lewis |