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Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .

Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Folly
Obvious
Financial
Rich
Everything
Would
Histories
Retrospect
Authors

More quotes by Michael Lewis

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As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.
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Icelandic people are inbred. And they have a sense of themselves as genetically special, and a history of risk-taking because they make their living on the high seas fishing. Assets generally rose in value during this period, and so it looked like they actually knew what they were doing.
Michael Lewis
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It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.
Michael Lewis
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Just because you've been successful and just because you've disrupted an environment, doesn't mean you're a role model or that you actually have anything to teach anybody. There's an awful lot of luck and accident in the world, and maybe you were just on the receiving end of that.
Michael Lewis
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I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.
Michael Lewis
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The Germans made just about every bad investment you could have made in the last 10 years. They invested in Icelandic banks. They invested in Greek government bonds. They were heavy into Irish banks, big into Irish banks, and they bought U.S. subprime mortgage bonds.
Michael Lewis
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That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.
Michael Lewis
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Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time.
Michael Lewis
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Girls tend to attribute their failures to factors such as lack of ability, while boys tend to attribute failure to specific factors, including teachers' attitudes. Moreover, girls avoid situations in which failure is likely, whereas boys approach such situations as a challenge, indicating that failure differentially affects self-esteem.
Michael Lewis
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My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.
Michael Lewis
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When an American declares bankruptcy, when he hits bottom, he can reinvent himself. There's a story he can tell. We tolerate reinvention. We encourage reinvention. That's what this country has that Europe does not. It's not just a crisis it's an opportunity.
Michael Lewis
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In Wall Street now, you have to hide what you're doing. It's more fun when you don't have to do that. But I don't think its sense of purpose has changed at all.
Michael Lewis
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The longer-term the option, the sillier the results generated by the Black-Scholes option pricing model, and the greater the opportunity for people who didn't use it.
Michael Lewis
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All of a sudden the market is all about algos and routers.
Michael Lewis
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He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.
Michael Lewis
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The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.
Michael Lewis
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Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.
Michael Lewis
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A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.
Michael Lewis
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A tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.
Michael Lewis
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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