Quotes from Michael Lewis

What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.

Courage is a muscle memory. The tallest oak in the forest was once just a little nut that held its ground.

The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a "Purgation-Calendar." Then there is the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings. "As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!," to select but one of the seemingly endless examples.

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.

automated voices and the bells from the row of testing machines in the back. The walls were white cinder block, the floors speckled linoleum. At the front desk were four large black ladies. Leigh Anne handed all the documents over to one of them, who took one look at them and said in a slow drawl, "Uh-uh. This school

People often work hard to obtain information they already have

The same system that once gave us subprime mortgage collateralized debt obligations no investor could possibly truly understand now gave us stock market trades that occurred at fractions of a penny at unsafe speeds using order types that no investor could possibly truly understand.

The frantic stupidity of Wall Street's stock order routers and algorithms was simply an extension into the computer of the willful ignorance of its salespeople.

People think that complex is an advanced state of complicated," said Zoran. "It's not. A car key is simple. A car is complicated. A car in traffic is complex.

we are most often rewarded for punishing others, and punished for rewarding.

The financial markets paid a lot of people extremely well for narrow expertise and a few people, poorly, for the big, global views you needed to have if you were to allocate capital across markets.

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising. —Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

What was threatening was cold, hard intelligence.

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? He tried, but his English in-laws just looked at him strangely. They understood that someone else had just lost a great deal of money and Ben had just made a great deal of money, but never got much past that. I can't really talk to them about it, he says. They're English.

Why do you always answer a question with another question?" "Clarity," he said.

The simple measure of sanity in housing prices, Zelman argued, was the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, in the United States, it ran around 3:1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally, to 4:1. "All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries," says Zelman. "But the problem wasn't just that it was four to one. In Los Angeles it was ten to one and in Miami, eight-point-five to one.

The role had been spawned by the widespread belief that traders didn't know how to talk to computer geeks and that computer geeks did not respond rationally to big, hairy traders hollering at them.

The batter's box was a cage designed to crush his spirit.

That was Eisman's logic: the logic of Wall Street's pecking order. Goldman Sachs was the big kid who ran the games in this neighborhood. Merrill Lynch was the little fat kid assigned the least pleasant roles, just happy to be a part of things. The game, as Eisman saw it, was crack the whip. He assumed Merrill Lynch had taken its assigned place at the end of the chain. On

The paper analyzed the effects of that inability, and showed that American cities that caved to pressure from business interests to relax their social distancing rules experienced big second waves of disease.

the risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don't.

Los psicólogos de finales de los años cuarenta habían detectado, o afirmaban haber detectado, que la mente tenía la capacidad para defenderse de lo que en apariencia no quería percibir.

What do you tell your mother when she asks you where to put her money?" I asked. "Guns and gold

Best of all, he gave us a rule of thumb about information in the markets that I later found useful: "Those who say don't know, and those who know don't say.