“The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar’s Poker
“In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
“What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions–if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they’re still all wrong.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
“Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .”
― Michael Lewis, Panic!: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity
“Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.”
― Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
“The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
“Those who know don’t tell and those who tell don’t know.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar’s Poker
“Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then to pick a strategy that is most efficient,” Said Palmer. ” The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“Germans longed to be near shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis.”
― Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
“The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys
