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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
Obvious
Financial
Rich
Everything
Would
Histories
Retrospect
Authors
Folly

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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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Donald Trump got almost 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton! He happened to get more in some of the right places. It was just like one of those things where a stock going up and people impose a false sense of order on it. It's really more intellectually honestly viewed as a disorderly process.
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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.
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Hollywood would much prefer the author be dead, so that they can buy the book and do what they want to do with 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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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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Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.
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We change for the good so long as good exists around us.
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There's something bad in everything good and something good in everything bad.
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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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Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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I was gonna put him on the bus...I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home.
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