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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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Michael Lewis
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Making
Sense
Even
Mind
Like
Senseless
World
Uncertainty
People
Tools
Minds

More quotes by Michael Lewis

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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
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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
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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
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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.
Michael Lewis
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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
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Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.
Michael Lewis
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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.
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.
Michael Lewis
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We change for the good so long as good exists around us.
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.
Michael Lewis
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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
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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.
Michael Lewis
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Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.
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.
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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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
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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
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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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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
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That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.
Michael Lewis