Quotes from Michael Lewis

After that, the men in the room rushed for the exits, apparently to sell their shares in Bear Stearns. By the time Alan Greenspan arrived to speak, there was hardly anyone who cared to hear what he had to say. The audience was gone. By Monday, Bear Stearns was of course gone, too, sold to J.P. Morgan for $2 a share.*

These folks don't know what they're talking about. If losses go to ten percent there will be, like, a million homeless people." (Losses in the pools Hubler's group had bet on would eventually reach 40 percent.)

National Sarcasm Society: Like We Need Your Support.

Whenever Wall Street people tried to argue—as they often did—that the subprime lending problem was caused by the mendacity and financial irresponsibility of ordinary Americans, he'd

Anti-intellectual resentment is common in all of American life and it has many diverse expressions

Meriwether spent his entire day avoiding dumb bets, and he wasn't about to accept this one.

Fracking—to take one example—was not the brainchild of private-sector research but the fruit of research paid for twenty years ago by the DOE. Yet fracking has collapsed the price of oil and gas and led to American energy independence. Solar and wind technologies are another example. The

fourth risk: the electrical grid. The river and its tributaries generate more than 40 percent of the hydroelectric power for the United States; were the dams to fail, the effects would be catastrophic.

He was like some tragic figure in Greek mythology whose offenses against the gods had caused them to design for him this exquisite torture: you must desperately need to see what you cannot bear to see.

some broker somewhere took out a handsome fee for himself, without necessarily doing much work.

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.

If you are going to start a regulatory regime from scratch, you'd design it to protect middle-and lower-middle-income people, because the opportunity for them to get ripped off was so high. Instead what we had was a regime where those were the people who were protected the least." Eisman

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.

Subprime mortgage lending was still a trivial fraction of the U.S. credit markets—a few tens of billions in loans each year—but its existence made sense, even to Steve Eisman. "I thought it was partly a response to growing income inequality," he said. "The distribution of income in this country was skewed and becoming more skewed, and the result was that you have more subprime customers.

He wore the same shorts and t-shirts to work for days on end. He refused to wear shoes with laces. He refused to wear watches or even his wedding ring. To calm himself at work he often blared heavy metal music.

BAFU. Billions and All Fucked Up.

The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran major league baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games.

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.

the people who already saw themselves as experts in the field would be least capable of original thought.

He walked around the Las Vegas casino incredulous at the spectacle before him: seven thousand people, all of whom seemed delighted with the world as they found it. A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems, and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen.

In 2008 it was the entire financial system that was at risk. We were still short. But you don't want the system to crash. It's sort of like the flood's about to happen and you're Noah. You're on the ark. Yeah, you're okay. But you are not happy looking out at the flood. That's not a happy moment for Noah." By

This was yet another consequence of turning Wall Street partnerships into public corporations: It turned them into objects of speculation. It was no longer the social and economic relevance of a bank that rendered it too big to fail, but the number of side bets that had been made upon it.

But if you worry about everything, you wind up worrying about nothing.

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.