Quotes from Michael Lewis

Think for yourself along rational lines. Hypothesize, test against the evidence, never accept that a question has been answered as well as it ever will be.

that Wall Street was propping up the price of these CDOs so that they might either dump losses on unsuspecting customers or make a last few billion dollars from a corrupt market.

young man who set out to study the Talmud, not because he had the slightest interest in God but because he was curious about its internal contradictions.

Going around the table, people took turns responding to a request to "talk about your experience of being a minority at RBC." When Brad's turn came he said, "To be honest, the only time I've ever felt like a minority is this exact moment. If you really want to encourage diversity you shouldn't make people feel like a minority." Then he left.

It's what you fail to imagine that kills you.

RBC invited Brad along with a bunch of other nonwhite people to a meeting to discuss the issue. Going around the table, people took turns responding to a request to "talk about your experience of being a minority at RBC." When Brad's turn came he said, "To be honest, the only time I've ever felt like a minority is this exact moment. If you really want to encourage diversity you shouldn't make people feel like a minority.

The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn't teach us anything.

The nice thing about things that are urgent," he liked to say, "is that if you wait long enough they aren't urgent anymore." "I would say to Amos I have to do this or I have to do that," recalled his old friend Yeshu Kolodny. "And he would say, 'No. You don't.' And I thought: lucky man!

In the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative the conclusion we draw therefrom….

The quarterback of the Washington Redskins, Joe Theismann, turns and hands the ball to running back John Riggins. He watches Riggins run two steps forward, turn, and flip the ball back to him. It's what most people know as a "flea-flicker," but the Redskins call it a "throw back special." Two Mississippi: Theismann searches for a receiver but instead sees Harry Carson coming

The first day after the merger, Brad got a call from a worried female employee, who whispered, "There is a guy in here with suspenders walking around with a baseball bat in his hands, taking swings." That turned out to be Carlin's CEO, Jeremy Frommer, who, whatever else he was, was not RBC nice. One of Frommer's signature poses was feet up on his desk, baseball bat swinging wildly over his head while some poor shoeshine guy tried to polish his shoes.

Long Beach Savings was the first existing bank to adopt what was called the "originate and sell" model. This proved such a hit—Wall Street would buy your loans, even if you would not!—that a new company, called B&C mortgage, was founded to do nothing but originate and sell.

It's one thing to bet on red or black and know that you are betting on red or black. It's another to bet on a form of red and not to know it.

Danny should have been elated: Everything they had thought might happen was now happening. He wasn't elated, however; he was anxious. At 10:30, an hour into trading, every financial stock went into a free fall, whether it deserved to or not. "All this information goes through me," he said. "I'm supposed to know how to transmit information. Prices were moving so quickly I couldn't get a fix. It felt like a black hole. The abyss." It

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.

Danny's trading life was man versus man, but this felt more like man versus nature: The synthetic CDO had become a synthetic natural disaster.

I almost think the better the idea, and the more iconoclastic the investor, the more likely you will get screamed at by investors, he [Michael Burry] said.

How about you keep the tens of millions you nearly prevented me from earning for you last year and we call it even?

The long-shot bet, in some strange way, was a young man's game. Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai no longer felt, or acted, quite so young.

Maybe the mind's best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things. Over

Valerie Feigen watched in near bewilderment as her husband acquired, haltingly, in fits and starts, a trait resembling tact.

In early October 2008, after the U.S. government had stepped in to say it would, in effect, absorb all the losses in the financial system and prevent any big Wall Street firm from failing, Burry had started to buy stocks with enthusiasm, for the first time in years.

There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble's inflation. One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud….

By early 2005 all the big Wall Street investment banks were deep into the subprime game. Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley all had what they termed "shelves" for their subprime wares, with strange names like HEAT and SAIL and GSAMP, that made it a bit more difficult for the general audience to see that these subprime bonds were being underwritten by Wall Street's biggest names.