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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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Michael Lewis
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Willing
Shortage
Changed
Mortgage
History
Constraints
Much
Incredibly
People
Quickly
Critical
Market
Juncture
Financial
Constraint

More quotes by Michael Lewis

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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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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.
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As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.
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Icelandic people are inbred. And they have a sense of themselves as genetically special, and a history of risk-taking because they make their living on the high seas fishing. Assets generally rose in value during this period, and so it looked like they actually knew what they were doing.
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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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In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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There has been this - and it's reflected in the broadcasts - this moronic use of statistics. Which has suggested to everyone who is intelligent the use of statistics is moronic.
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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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People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.
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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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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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I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.
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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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Just because you've been successful and just because you've disrupted an environment, doesn't mean you're a role model or that you actually have anything to teach anybody. There's an awful lot of luck and accident in the world, and maybe you were just on the receiving end of that.
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