Quotes from Michael Lewis

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. Three

I wonder," James wrote, "if we haven't become so numbed by all these numbers that we are no longer capable of truly assimilating any knowledge which might result from them.

The presence of millions of small investors had politicized the stock market. It had been legislated and regulated to at least seem fair.

Daryl Morey] suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his mind well enough to mistrust it

Each time, Lippmann would talk a mile a minute, and Danny and Vinny would stare in wonder. Their meetings acquired the flavor of a postmodern literary puzzle: The story rang true even as the narrator seemed entirely unreliable.

The more egregious the rating agencies' mistakes, the bigger the opportunity for the Wall Street trading desks. In

For geniuses, they are really dumb," she said. "Some of them are really pampered: They can't even put together a cardboard box. They don't think you do something. They think you call somebody.

As the bonds were all priced off the Moody's rating, the most overpriced bonds were the bonds that had been most ineptly rated. And the bonds that had been most ineptly rated were the bonds that Wall Street firms had tricked the rating agencies into rating most ineptly.

Even as late as the summer of 2006, as home prices began to fall, it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them—to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch. Each of these people told you something about the state of the financial system, in the same way that people who survive a plane crash told you something about the accident, and also about the nature of people who survive accidents.

Trump was like . . . I love the Bangles! You know that song 'Walk Like an Egyptian'?

Jamie Mai was tall and strikingly handsome and so, almost by definition, had the air of a man in charge—until he opened his mouth and betrayed his lack of confidence in everything from tomorrow's sunrise to the future of the human race.

She dropped the matter, and his birthday remained May 28. Armed with the Social Security card, the birth certificate, and the letter from Principal Simpson of the Briarcrest Christian School, they drove the next day to the Department of Motor Vehicles. This time they had Collins in tow. Collins

It is ludicrous to believe that asset bubbles can only be recognized in hindsight," he wrote. "There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble's inflation.

James Yorke, a professor who had coined the term "chaos theory." The idea was simple: some small, barely noticed event can cascade into huge consequences down the road. (The day your parents met, for instance: what if that hadn't happened?)

The options suited the two men's personalities: They never had to be sure of anything. Both were predisposed to feel that people, and by extension markets, were too certain about inherently uncertain things. Both sensed that people, and by extension markets, had difficulty attaching the appropriate probabilities to highly improbable events. Both had trouble generating conviction of their own but no trouble at all reacting to what they viewed as the false conviction of others.

I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed.

how "intense mental activity hinders perception." They found that it wasn't just emotional arousal that altered the size of the pupil: Mental effort had the same effect. There was, quite possibly, as they put it, "an antagonism between thinking and perceiving.

The idea that everyone is entitled to his/her opinion was a California thing—that's not how we did things in Jerusalem.

Send me a list of the 2006 deals with high no-doc loans." Eisman, predisposed to suspect fraud in the market, wanted to bet against Americans who had been lent money without having been required to show evidence of income or employment. "I figured Lippmann was going to send me deals that had twenty percent no docs. He sent us a list and none of them had less than fifty percent.

The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money.

There was so much confusion about the different terms," said Charlie. "In the course of trying to figure it out, we realize that there's a reason why it doesn't quite make sense to us. It's because it doesn't quite make sense." The

2005 there would be $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Half a trillion dollars in subprime mortgage–backed bonds in a single year.

The subprime mortgage market had a special talent for obscuring what needed to be clarified.

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.