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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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Michael Lewis
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Investment
Germans
Heavy
Invested
Last
Bonds
Bigs
Mortgage
Government
Irish
Made
Banks
Every
Bought
Years
Greek
Icelandic

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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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In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt.
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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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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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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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Like Adam, formed from clay, children are formed from the biological material of which they are made or by the hands of their parents.
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People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.
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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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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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The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.
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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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In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation.
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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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There's a certain status to suffering in Ireland, that the person who - if you're sitting around a table, the person with the greatest status is the person who had the most horrible thing happen to them most recently.
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