Quotes from Michael Lewis

In Eisman's view, the unwillingness of the U.S. government to allow the bankers to fail was less a solution than a symptom of a still deeply dysfunctional financial system.

There was, for starters, the tendency of everyone who actually played the game to generalize wildly from his own experience. People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn't.

This wasn't just another company—this was the biggest company by far making subprime loans. And it was engaged in just blatant fraud. They should have taken the CEO out and hung him up by his fucking testicles.

A new force in pro football, Taylor demanded not just a tactical response but an explanation. Many people pointed to his unusual combination of size and speed. As one of the Redskins' linemen put it, "No human being should be six four, two forty-five, and run a four-five forty.

default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Only a triple-A-rated corporation could assume such risk, no money down, and no questions asked. Burry was right about this, too, but it would be three years before he knew it. The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG—American International Group, Inc. Or, rather, a unit of AIG called AIG FP. AIG Financial Products was created

The big fear of the 1980s mortgage bond investor was that he would be repaid too quickly, not that he would fail to be repaid at all. The pool of loans underlying the mortgage bond conformed to the standards, in their size and the credit quality of the borrowers, set by one of several government agencies: Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Ginnie Mae. The loans carried, in effect, government guarantees; if the homeowners defaulted, the government paid off their debts.

best definition of "investing" is "gambling with the odds in your favor." The people on the short side of the subprime mortgage market had gambled with the odds in their favor. The people on the other side—the entire financial system, essentially—had gambled with the odds against them.

THE SECRET OF SUCCESS IS TO UNDERSTAND THE POINT OF VIEW OF OTHERS. —Henry Ford

All these subprime companies were calling and hollering at him: You're wrong. Your data's wrong. And he just hollered back at them, 'It's YOUR fucking data!

cause of the financial crisis was "simple. Greed on both sides—greed of investors and the greed of the bankers." I thought it was more complicated. Greed on Wall Street was a given—almost an obligation. The problem was the system of incentives that channeled the greed. The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin.

And so it went in football. The game attracted the very people most likely to get in trouble outside

Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions.

Regret was the ham in the back of the deli that caused people to switch from turkey to roast beef.

Investing well was all about being paid the right price for risk.

WHEN HE WAS a young man Billy Beane could beat anyone at anything.

As early as 1999, Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. ("Bud") Selig had taken to calling the Oakland A's success "an aberration," but that was less an explanation than an excuse not to grapple with the question: how'd they do it? What was their secret?

the less the female presence, the less rational the approach to trading in the markets.

The purpose was to extend credit to less and less creditworthy homeowners, not so that they might buy a house but so that they could cash out whatever equity they had in the house they already owned.

Every form of strength is also a form of weakness," he once wrote. "Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them.

The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold. Back

If you're in a business where you can do only one thing and it doesn't work out, it's hard for your bosses to be mad at you.

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.

the Wall Street firm became a black box. The shareholders who financed the risk taking had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and, as the risk taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished.

Both had trouble generating conviction of their own but no trouble at all reacting to what they viewed as the false conviction of others.