Quotes from Michael Lewis

Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places.

The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn't possible," she said. "Our dignity was lost in not even trying to contain it.

With stagnant wages and booming consumption, the cash-strapped American masses had a virtually unlimited demand for loans but an uncertain ability to repay them.

People no longer are responsible for what happens in the market, because computers make all the decisions.

For a lot of the players it was their first exposure to the Southern female - the most flagrant cheater in the mutual disarmament pact known as feminism. Lipstick! Hairdos! Submissiveness!

He gave a talk in which he argued that the way they measured risk was completely idiotic. They measured risk by volatility: how much a stock or bond happened to have jumped around in the past few years. Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions.

The author refers to a player's affected nonchalance and comments he is, too young to realize you are what you pretend to be.

How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation?

Dont worry about where i am , i'll let you know when i get there .

the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it.

One of the reasons Wall Street had cooked up this new industry called structured finance was that its old-fashioned business was every day less profitable. The profits in stockbroking, along with those in the more conventional sorts of bond broking, had been squashed by Internet competition.

Isocrates: "Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress.

What was the secret to dealing with the assholes? "Lift weights or learn karate," said O'Grady.

When you're a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off

It said something about the ability of the free marketplace to mold people's behavior into a socially acceptable pattern. For this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive.

Donnie Green himself had been a trader at Salomon Brothers in the dark ages, when traders had more hair on their chests than on their heads.

The market might have learned a simple lesson: Don't make loans to people who can't repay them. Instead it learned a complicated one: You can keep on making these loans, just don't keep them on your books. Make the loans, then sell them off to the fixed income departments of big Wall Street investment banks, which will in turn package them into bonds and sell them to investors.

In the red southern states the mayor sometimes would say," Can you not mention that the government gave this?

After the meeting, RBC conducted a study, never released publicly, in which they found that more than two hundred SEC staffers since 2007 had left their government jobs to work for high-frequency trading firms or the firms that lobbied Washington

We tried to trademark proximity, but you can't because it's a word

Someone out there was using the fact that stock market orders arrived at different times at different exchanges to front-run orders from one market to another.

They hired a PhD student from the statistics department at the University of California at Berkeley to help them, but he quit after they asked him to study the market for pork belly futures. "It turned out that he was a vegetarian," said Jamie. "He had a problem with capitalism in general, but the pork bellies pushed him over the edge.

Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn't go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn't ever do it twice.

The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings, made it "quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.