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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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Michael Lewis
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Management
Risk
Learned
Canned
Loved
Tomatoes
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Client
Commodity
Clients
Sold
More quotes by Michael Lewis
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.
Michael Lewis
People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.
Michael Lewis
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
In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt.
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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
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
It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.
Michael Lewis
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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They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.
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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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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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Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.
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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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He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.
Michael Lewis
You can anchor the mind into answering a question a certain way by giving them a totally unrelated piece of information dropped before.
Michael Lewis
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.
Michael Lewis
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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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 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.
Michael Lewis
All of a sudden the market is all about algos and routers.
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