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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
Everything
Would
Histories
Retrospect
Authors
Folly
Obvious
Financial
Rich

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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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My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.
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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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It's such a pain in the ass to write a book, I can't imagine writing one if I'm not interested in the subject.
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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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All that was clear that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise.
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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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Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.
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A vast industry of stockbrokers, financial planners, and investment advisers skims a fortune for themselves off the top in exchange for passing their clients' money on to people who, as a whole, cannot possibly outperform the market.
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What happens when we acknowledge the sovereignty and power of God without trusting in His goodness and faithfulness? A pitcher who saw God's power behind his extremely unlikely rise to the big leagues wondered if, at any difficulty he encountered there, God might be taking his ability away.
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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 something happens people didn't predict, they find ways to explain it as if it were predictable.
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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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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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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.
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He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.
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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.
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Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.
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People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.
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