Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Michael Lewis
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
People
Enterprise
Customers
Servicing
Profit
Allocating
Complicated
Bets
Smart
Profits
Clear
Overwhelmed
Making
Capital
Anything
Productive

More quotes by Michael Lewis

Image
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.
Michael Lewis
Image
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.
Michael Lewis
Image
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.
Michael Lewis
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.
Michael Lewis
Image
Hollywood would much prefer the author be dead, so that they can buy the book and do what they want to do with it.
Michael Lewis
Image
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.
Michael Lewis
Image
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.
Michael Lewis
Image
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
Image
There's no point in arguing with partisan supporters. Their views are their identity. Nothing you can tell the most phlegmatic follower.
Michael Lewis
Image
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
Image
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
Image
He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.
Michael Lewis
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When something happens people didn't predict, they find ways to explain it as if it were predictable.
Michael Lewis
Image
Looking into it a bit, Jamie found that the model used by Wall Street to price LEAPs, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, made some strange assumptions.
Michael Lewis
Image
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.
Michael Lewis