Quotes from Michael Lewis

That was the reason the casino bothered to list the wheel's most recent spins: to help gamblers to delude themselves.

Talking to a programmer type about the trading business was a bit like talking to the house plumber at work in the basement about the card game the Mafia don was running upstairs.

There was one sure way, and only one sure way, to get ahead, and everyone with eyes in 1982 saw it: Major in economics; use your economics degree to get an analyst job on Wall Street; use your analyst job to get into the Harvard or Stanford Business School; and worry about the rest of your life later. So

The "consumer loan" piles that Wall Street firms, led by Goldman Sachs, asked AIG FP to insure went from being 2 percent subprime mortgages to being 95 percent subprime mortgages. In a matter of months, AIG FP, in effect, bought $50 billion in triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds by insuring them against default.

The public health texts of the future will use this as a lesson on how not to handle an infectious disease pandemic.

I have a job to do. Make money for my clients. Period. But boy it gets morbid when you start making investments that work out extra great if a tragedy occurs.

All good inventions come from something personal," she said. "People create things because it's personal.

The entire health industry lies about what things cost to make," she said. "I know what things cost because I made them.

The ability of Wall Street traders to see themselves in their success and their management in their failure would later be echoed, when their firms, which disdained the need for government regulation in good times, insisted on being rescued by government in bad times. Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.

The best decisions he has made in his life, he said, were completely unexpected, the ones that cut against convention. Then he went even further. He said that every decision he has forced himself to make because it was unexpected has been a good one.

Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck—and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

There is nothing more satisfying to me," he said, "than to create a complete self-contained world when a computer is controlling it.

The game has some of the feel of trading, just as jousting has some of the feel of war.

Light fades as it travels; the fainter it becomes, the less capable it is of transmitting data.

The method of his execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man who played Mr. You're Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life.

So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative. The

It was striking how little control we had of events, particularly in view of how assiduously we cultivated the appearance of being in charge by smoking big cigars and saying fuck all the time.

Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: They had been forced to learn to program computers without the luxury of endless computer time. Many years later, when he had plenty of computer time, Serge still wrote out new programs on paper before typing them into the machine. "In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes," he said. "When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work.

Eisman was quick to see narratives, he explained the world in stories, and this was one of the stories he used to explain himself. The

Who takes out a home loan and doesn't make the first payment?" asked Danny Moses, putting the matter one way. "Who the fuck lends money to people who can't make the first payment?" asked Eisman, putting it another.

Trump's budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire—to remain ignorant.

He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.

Only someone who has Asperger's would read a subprime mortgage bond prospectus

The creation of the mortgage bond market, a decade earlier, had extended Wall Street into a place it had never before been: the debts of ordinary Americans.