Quote

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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Michael Lewis
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Pennies
Mexican
California
Income
Picker
English
Strawberry
Needed
Lent
House
Strawberries
Every
Penny

More quotes by Michael Lewis

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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 change for the good so long as good exists around us.
Michael Lewis
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I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.
Michael Lewis
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Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .
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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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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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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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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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People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.
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.
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Even as late as the summer of 2006, as home prices began to fall, it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them-to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch.
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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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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.
Michael Lewis
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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.
Michael Lewis
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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.
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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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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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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Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then to pick a strategy that is most efficient, Said Palmer. The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.
Michael Lewis
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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.
Michael Lewis