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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
Financial
Rich
Everything
Histories
Would
Retrospect
Authors
Folly
Obvious

More quotes by 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.
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Incredibly, at this critical juncture in financial history, after which so much changed so quickly, the only constraint in the subprime mortgage market was a shortage of people willing to bet against it.
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In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt.
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The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.
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My judgement is not good when I am on a book tour. I am not thinking about it that much. What happens is I will go back home. I have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old and a wife who is now taking care of them who is wondering where her husband is.
Michael Lewis
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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.
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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I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.
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.
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What's fun is watching actors of that calibre bring them to life. It's incredible. Christian Bale spent a day with the character he plays and after my year of being with him I couldn't have generated the same view of him. They have a different way of looking at people, it's fascinating to watch.
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When something happens people didn't predict, they find ways to explain it as if it were predictable.
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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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He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.
Michael Lewis
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Commitment, by its nature, frees us from ourselves and, while it stands us in opposition to some, it joins us with others similarly committed. Commitment moves us from the mirror trap of the self absorbed with the self to the freedom of a community of shared values.
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
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In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation.
Michael Lewis
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He's a machine for competitive balance, ... Yes, the money is in New York. Yes, the money is in his hands. But he squanders money. Thank God for it.
Michael Lewis
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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.
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.
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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.
Michael Lewis