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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
Rich
Everything
Would
Histories
Retrospect
Authors
Folly
Obvious
Financial

More quotes by Michael Lewis

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Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.
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If you had to point to one thing that made it less likely that the Red Sox would win the World Series, I would say it was those people that go to Fenway Park to watch the games. And then the media around it.
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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.
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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.
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The incentives are still rotten, and people are still paid to do things they shouldn't be doing. The reforms did not really address the incentives, the system is still dysfunctional and there are still behavioural issues that need to be addressed.
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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.
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Looking into it a bit, Jamie found that the model used by Wall Street to price LEAPs, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, made some strange assumptions.
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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.
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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.
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We aren't natural statisticians. What we are is natural storytelling machines. And so what we do after we have the facts in hand is build a story to explain the facts.
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We change for the good so long as good exists around us.
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I'd stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985, and stumbled out, richer, in 1988, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me me as totally preposterous-which is one reason the money was so easy to walk away from.
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Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.
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One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.
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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.
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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.
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The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less.
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We have the Google family calendar. Before a week starts, my wife and I sit down to decide who's driving who to school or when can we go out on a date.
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The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.
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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.
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