Quotes from Michael Lewis

Amos willed himself to be optimistic, because he had decided pessimism was stupid. 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.

In math you always check your work. In medicine, no.

Glass-Steagall was an act of the US Congress, but it worked more like an act of God. It cleaved mankind in two. With it, in 1934, American lawmakers had stripped investment banking out from commercial banking. Investment bankers now underwrote securities, such as stocks and bonds. Commercial bankers, like Citibank, took deposits and made loans. The act, in effect, created the investment banking profession, the single most important event in the history of the world, or so I was led to believe.

Nineteen eighteen, said Carter. What happened then? asked Obama. Thirty percent of the population was infected, and two percent died

Actually, they soon discovered, you had to reduce the amount of the certain loss even further if you wanted to get people to accept it. When choosing between sure things and gambles, people's desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.

because there is no such thing on Wall Street as too many acronyms, became known as the SIP. The thirteen stock markets piped their prices into the SIP, and the SIP calculated the NBBO. The SIP was the picture of the U.S. stock market most investors saw. Like a lot of regulations, Reg NMS was well-meaning and sensible. If everyone on Wall Street abided by the rule's spirit, the rule would have established a new

I couldn't design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system," he said after his visit.

The gist of it was that people don't learn what is imposed upon them but rather what they freely seek, out of desire or need.

We want to empower the doctors and patients to get all the other assholes out of the way,' Clark had once told me, then laughed. 'Except for us. One asshole in the middle.

The infection fatality rate had not just a numerator (deaths) but also a denominator (infections). If you didn't know how many people had survived infection, you couldn't say how deadly the virus actually was.

The production of a compelling scenario is likely to constrain future thinking," wrote Danny and Amos. "There is much evidence showing that, once an uncertain situation has been perceived or interpreted in a particular fashion, it is quite difficult to view it in any other way.

Eisman was now explaining why the world was going to blow up, but his partners were only half-listening…because the financial world was blowing up.

Slavitt renamed the plan "Victory over COVID-19" and presented it to Kushner as his own.

F ROM THE SNAP of the ball to the snap of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five. One Mississippi: The quarterback of the Washington Redskins, Joe Theismann, turns and hands the ball to running back John Riggins.

As Kat DeBurgh, head of the Health Officers Association of California, put it, "To do the job of local public-health officer, you basically always need to be willing to lose your job.

Josh instead found himself trying to save Americans from their public-health system.

After all, the job market is a market.

No one seemed to be exploring the most efficient and least disruptive ways to remove people from social networks.

He laughed, but in the way people do who want to prove they get the joke. The Dutch do this a lot. They appear to live in terror of being mistaken for Germans, and to compensate by finding a funny side to life where none exists. Tell a Dutchman that your dog just died, and he will pretend that you have just made some impossibly witty remark.

Why doesn't the United States have the institutions it needs to save itself?

I didn't recognize but now know to be Liar's Poker.

Hitler's doctors told U.S. intelligence officers that their patient had devoted surprising energy to examining his own feces; and there was pretty strong evidence that one of his favorite things to do with women was to have them poop on him.

Tornadoes aren't like that. Like the rest of the weather in the continental United States, they move from west to east, but the paths they take are random. Their force can be judged only after the fact, by the damage they've done. If a hurricane is another night in a bad marriage, a tornado is a blind date.

Analysts photocopied, proofread, and assembled breathtakingly dull securities documents for ninety and more hours a week. If they did this particularly well, analysts were thought well of by their bosses. This was a dubious