Quotes from Michael Lewis

Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn't mean it wasn't a good book. It was a very good book.

Complicated financial stuff was being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it.

It shouldn't be the Centers for Disease Control. It should be the Centers for Disease Observation and Reporting. That's what they do well.

Dark pools were another rogue spawn of the new financial marketplace. Private stock exchanges, run by the big brokers, they were not required to reveal to the public what happened inside them. They reported any trade they executed, but they did so with sufficient delay that it was impossible to know exactly what was happening in the broader market at the moment the trade occurred.

A man got to have a code. - Omar Little

The source of his unhappiness was, as usual, other people.

You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late. You can't outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you. Identify what is important and drop everything that is not. Figure out the equivalent of an escape fire.

But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.

You want loyalty, hire a cocker spaniel.

Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice.

Anti-intellectual resentment is common in all of American life and it has many diverse expressions. Refusing to draft college players might have been one of them. Bill James

It was hard to know which of Billy's qualities was most important to his team's success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players.

What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant.

When banking stops, credit stops, and when credit stops, trade stops, and when trade stops—well, the city of Chicago had only eight days of chlorine on hand for its water supply. Hospitals ran out of medicine. The entire modern world was premised on the ability to buy now and pay later.

The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted.

a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.

why they studied economics, and they'd explain that it was the most practical course of study, even while they spent their time drawing funny little graphs.

That's all right," says Billy. "We're blending what we see but we aren't allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see.

Investment bankers make money for a living.

Charlie Ledley—curiously uncertain Charlie Ledley—was odd in his belief that the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.

Confirmation bias," he'd heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. "Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don't even realize it is happening," he said. A scout would settle on an opinion about a player and then arrange the evidence to support that opinion. "The

If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer's pocket was a dollar in ours, and vice versa.

You can keep mistakes from happening if you can identify the almost mistakes. This kind of changes how I view everything.

Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time.