Quotes from Michael Lewis

There are a lot of really crappy bonds in these CDOs,'" said Charlie. They didn't realize yet that the bonds inside their CDOs were actually credit default swaps on the bonds, and so their CDOs weren't ordinary CDOs but synthetic CDOs, or that the bonds on which the swaps were based had been handpicked by Mike Burry and Steve Eisman and others betting against the market. In many ways, they were still innocents.

These people believed that the collapse of the subprime mortgage market was unlikely precisely because it would be such a catastrophe. Nothing so terrible could ever actually happen. The

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.

The smart person accepts. The idiot insists.

Success was his chosen form of revenge.

Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven't really earned.

Los sujetos no elegían entre cosas. Elegían entre descripciones de cosas.

there must be some connection between his excessively romantic attitude toward computer programming and his appeal to women.

The trick was not simply to write the code that turned information into pictures but to find the best pictures to draw—shapes and colors that led the mind to meaning.

big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are.

we're helping the consumer. Because we're taking him out of his high interest rate credit card debt and putting him into lower interest rate mortgage debt.

People who want very badly to win, and to be seen to have won, enjoy a tactical advantage over people who don't. That very desire, tantamount to a need, is also a weakness. In Billy Beane, the trait is so pronounced that it is not merely a weakness. It is a curse.

With every stroke of their keyboards they hacked a path through the forest that others would be required to follow.

The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction.

To Danny and Vinny, Greg Lippmann was a walking embodiment of the bond market, which is to say he was put on earth to screw the customer.

Liquidity. When an executive said his bank had plenty of liquidity it always meant that it didn't. At

unpleasant odor wafting from the subprime mortgage industry that Eisman had detected. These companies disclosed their ever-growing earnings, but not much else. One of the many items they failed to disclose was the delinquency rate of the home loans they were making.

Vinny, always darker, said, There were more morons than crooks, but the crooks were higher up.

To Redelmeier the very idea that there was a great deal of uncertainty in medicine went largely unacknowledged by its authorities. There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error. The entire profession had arranged itself as if to confirm the wisdom of its decisions.

Resistance to understanding a threat grows with proximity," writes Kate Brown.)

The fact that it is such an opaque industry should be alarming," Brad said. "The fact that the people who make the most money want the least clarity possible—that should be alarming, too.

Microsoft was twelve years old before people started talking about Microsoft millionaires; Netscape was one and a half.

Baseball—of all things—was an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method. As

His experience with Household Finance had disabused him of any hope that the government would intercede to prevent rich corporations from doing bad things to poor people.