Quotes About Risk

The job of the decision maker wasn't to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.

Allan confined himself to one investment decision: whether to buy shares in a new company when it went public.

Actually, they soon discovered, you had to reduce the amount of the certain loss even further if you wanted to get people to accept it. When choosing between sure things and gambles, people's desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.

I couldn't design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system," he said after his visit.

As Kat DeBurgh, head of the Health Officers Association of California, put it, "To do the job of local public-health officer, you basically always need to be willing to lose your job.

I didn't recognize but now know to be Liar's Poker.

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

Or how his soldiers, even in combat, refused to wear their helmets, claiming that the weather was too hot for them and "if a bullet is going to kill me, it has my name on it anyway." (To which Amos said, "What about all those bullets addressed 'To Whom It May Concern'?")

The interest rate on the loans wasn't high enough to justify the risk of lending to this particular slice of the American population. It was as if the ordinary rules of finance had been suspended in response to a social problem. A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

Whatever that guy is buying, I want to short it.

Fear and, to a lesser extent, greed are what make money move.

He was the guy who always won the game of chicken because his opponents suspected he might actually enjoy a head-on collision.

It's Laissez-Faire Until You Get In Deep Shit

For though there was no chance of persuading a pension fund manager looking to make a longer-term loan to buy a Freddie Mac bond that could evaporate tomorrow, one could easily sell him the third tranche of a CMO.

In medicine there were too many 120-volt plugs that fit into 240-volt outlets. The ease with which a nurse might give one patient medicine intended for another, for example

A big Wall Street bank's biggest advantage was its access to vast amounts of cheap risk capital and, with that, its ability to survive the ups and downs of a risky business. That meant little when the business wasn't risky and didn't require much capital. High-frequency traders went home every night with no position in the stock market. They traded in the market the way card counters in a casino played blackjack: They played only

The American institutions built to manage risk and respond to a virus had been engaged in a weird simulation of crisis response that did not involve actually trying to stop the virus. "The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn't possible," she said.

They stopped thinking like social justice warriors and became parents. Of course if there was a real risk of disease killing their children they'd keep their kids home from school!

American bond traders may have sunk their firms by turning a blind eye to the risks in the subprime bond market, but they made a fortune for themselves in the bargain, and have for the most part never been called to account.

No trader or investor wanted to poke around suburbs to find out whether the homeowner to whom he had just lent money was creditworthy. For the home mortgage to become a bond it had to be depersonalised. At

What could go wrong?

They were combing the markets for bets whose true odds were 10:1, priced as if the odds were 100:1.

A driver talking on a cell phone was four times as likely as a driver who wasn't to be involved in a crash, whether or not he held the phone in his hands

recalls Avishai Margalit. "You discussed people. It was a constant thing, a constant puzzle: What makes others tick? It comes from the shtetl. Jews were petty merchants. They had to assess others, all the time. Who is dangerous? Who is not dangerous? Who will repay the debt, who won't repay the debt? People were basically dependent on their psychological judgment.