Quotes from Michael Lewis

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 a nanosecond had value.

They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out, "It's really hard to know when you're lucky and when you're smart.

Ignorance allows people to disregard the consequences of their actions. And sometimes it leads to consequences even they did not intend.

Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system…Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said. "The prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules can be found" in an article written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [in 1985], Tremonti said yesterday at Milan's Cattolica University. —Bloomberg News, November 20, 2008

That was the moment I gave up on decision analysis," said Danny. "No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story." As Danny and Lanir wrote, decades later, after the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency asked them to describe their experience in decision analysis, the Israeli Foreign Ministry was "indifferent to the specific probabilities.

The expression "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" actually isn't usually true for human beings. It is for bacteria, however.

But the more rural the American, the more dependent he is for his way of life on the U.S. government. And the more rural the American, the more likely he was to have voted for Donald Trump. So you might think that Trump, when he took office, would do everything he could to strengthen and grow the little box marked "Rural Development." That's not what has happened.

if you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.

The world's not just a stage. It's a casino, and our lives are games of chance. And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity—or (strange new word!) representativeness. You

No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo.

rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine

What Gutfreund said has become a legend at Salomon Brothers and a visceral part of its corporate identity. He said: "One hand, one million dollars, no tears.

Thus the only Goldman Sachs employee arrested by the FBI in the aftermath of a financial crisis Goldman had done so much to fuel was the employee Goldman asked the FBI to arrest.

The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago.

Because the lenders sold many—though not all—of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry was also fraught with moral hazard. "It was a fast-buck business," says Jacobs. "Any business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people.

When someone says something, don't ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.

The markets were now run by technology, but the technologists were still treated like tools. Nobody bothered to explain the business to them, but they were forced to adapt to its demands and exposed to its failures—which was, perhaps, why there had been so many more conspicuous failures.

It's taboo," he said. "When they ask you why you want to be an investment banker, you're supposed to talk about the challenges, and the thrill of doing deals, and the excitement of working with such high-calibre people, but never, ever mention money.

Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself.

First base was a far richer social opportunity. First base made catching feeling like a bad dinner party - what with the ump hanging on your shoulder and all the fans and cameras staring at you. At first base you could really talk.

Here was another way Israel was different from the United States: Its wars were short, and someone always won.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. —Sun-tzu

I really do believe the final act in play is a crisis in our financial institutions, which are doing such dumb, dumb things

Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but only a few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion. —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince