Quotes from Michael Lewis

There is going to be a calamity, and whenever there is a calamity, Merrill is there.

But then, on April 9, 2018, Trump hired John Bolton as his national security adviser, and the next day, Bolton fired Tom Bossert, and demoted or fired everyone on the biological threat team. From that

It was clear what had happened," he later said. "This company started out with great ambitions, and then the ambition got smaller and smaller. I just took it back to Jim's original vision.

Value investors like Graham and Dodd are so focused on being the last one laughing that they miss a lot of the laughs in between.

The game of football evolved and here was one cause of its evolution, a new kind of athlete doing a new kind of

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

Charlie Ledley was even worse: He had the pallor of a mortician and the manner of a man bent on putting off, for as long as possible, definite action.

Spivey was a worrier. He thought that when a person took risks, the thing that went wrong was usually a thing the person hadn't thought about, and so he tried to think about the things he wouldn't naturally think about.

They had proven far less capable of grasping basic truths in the heart of the U.S. financial system than a one-eyed money manager with Asperger's syndrome.

There is an ancient rule of financial life—if you owe the bank 5 million bucks, the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank 5 billion bucks, you own the bank—that

I think it is easier to take someone in the fishing industry and teach him about currency trading," he says, "than to take someone from the banking industry and teach them how to fish." He then explained why fishing

They were conventional people who assumed that conventions made the world go round, which, of course, they usually do. In any case, they didn't really believe in the possibility of change, and so did not bring the passion of revolutionaries to their work. As one of their NEA colleagues explains it, 'Phil and Bill were totally unwilling to work nights and weekends, to write a business plan, brainstorm, spend time with Jim during the off hours, etc.

nurse at a VA hospital in Topeka, Kansas, had the bright idea of using bar codes on patients and medications to match them up

They mainly ran around the building insulting people

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.

like so many United States government agencies, the Department of Commerce is seriously misnamed. It has almost nothing to do with commerce directly and is actually forbidden by law from engaging in business. But it runs the United States Census, the only real picture of who Americans are as a nation.

More praise for Liar's Poker Selected as one of BusinessWeek's

we knew that in general the quality of treatment we received in the training class varied inversely with the desirability of the job held by the speaker. In this there was a lesson: To get the best job, you had to weather the most abuse.

The metaphor that Romer used to describe the economy to noneconomists was of a well-stocked kitchen waiting for a brilliant chef to exploit it. Everyone in the kitchen starts with more or less the same ingredients, the metaphor ran, but not everyone produces good food. And only a very few people who wander into the kitchen find entirely new ways to combine old ingredients into delightfully tasty recipes. These people were the wealth creators.

My book asked: What happens when the people in charge of managing these risks, along with the experts who understand them, have no interest in them?

Capitalism's machinery favored these capitalists as it had never favored anyone else in its history.

The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that nanoseconds had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all.

Once you were let into the Great Society of Sand Hill Road, you were given first crack at these miraculous enterprises at a small fraction of the cost to Wall Street investment bankers—never mind the general investing public.

I believe in God, but I'll never be nominated for saint