Michael Lewis Quotes

They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out, It's really hard to know when you're lucky and when you're smart. ~ Michael Lewis

The character at the center of Whyte's wonderful psychodrama was 'the well-rounded man.' The well-rounded man was the ideal 1950s type. Whyte wrote his book in part as an argument against the well-rounded man. He believed that when society exalted the well-rounded it punished the truly talented: the scientists, the artists, the musicians, the engineers, the people who came at life from surprising new directions. ~ Michael Lewis

I set out to write this book only because I thought it would be better to tell the story than to go on living the story. ~ Michael Lewis

The trick was not simply to write the code that turned information into pictures but to find the best pictures to draw - shapes and colors that led the mind to meaning. ~ Michael Lewis

Long Beach Savings was the first existing bank to adopt what was called the "originate and sell" model. This proved such a hit - Wall Street would buy your loans, even if you would not! - that a new company, called B&C mortgage, was founded to do nothing but originate and sell. ~ Michael Lewis

She spoke seven languages, including Mandarin and Polish, and was finishing up her master's in Intercultural Misunderstanding, which just has to be Europe's next growth industry. ~ Michael Lewis

After Volcker's speech, bonds became objects of speculation, a means of creating wealth rather than merely storing it. Overnight the bond market was transformed from a backwater into a casino. ~ Michael Lewis

I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed. ~ Michael Lewis

why the rating agencies weren't more critical of bonds underpinned by floating-rate subprime mortgages. Subprime borrowers tended to be one broken refrigerator away from default. Few, if any, should be running the risk of their interest payment spiking up. As most of these loans were structured, however, the homeowner would pay a fixed teaser rate of, say, 8 percent for the first two years, and then, at the start of the third year, the interest rate would skyrocket to, say, 12 percent, and thereafter it would float at permanently high levels. ~ Michael Lewis

No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo. When you have no money you can't afford long-term solutions, only short-term ones. You have to always be upgrading. Otherwise you're fucked. ~ Michael Lewis

When the Goldman Sachs saleswoman called Mike Burry and told him that her firm would be happy to sell him credit default swaps in $100 million chunks, Burry guessed, rightly, that Goldman wasn't ultimately on the other side of his bets. Goldman would never be so stupid as to make huge naked bets that millions of insolvent Americans would repay their home loans. He didn't know who, or why, or how much, but he knew that some giant corporate entity with a triple-A rating was out there selling credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Only a triple-A-rated corporation could assume such risk, no money down, and no questions asked. Burry was right about this, too, but it would be three years before he knew it. The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG - American International Group, Inc. ~ Michael Lewis

How about you keep the tens of millions you nearly prevented me from earning for you last year and we call it even? ~ Michael Lewis

Could Morgan Stanley please wire $1.2 billion to Deutsche Bank by the end of the day? ~ Michael Lewis

I really do believe the final act in play is a crisis in our financial institutions, which are doing such dumb, dumb things, ~ Michael Lewis

Danny should have been elated: Everything they had thought might happen was now happening. He wasn't elated, however; he was anxious. At 10:30, an hour into trading, every financial stock went into a free fall, whether it deserved to or not. "All this information goes through me," he said. "I'm supposed to know how to transmit information. Prices were moving so quickly I couldn't get a fix. It felt like a black hole. The abyss." It ~ Michael Lewis

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

For though there was no chance of persuading a pension fund manager looking to make a longer-term loan to buy a Freddie Mac bond that could evaporate tomorrow, one could easily sell him the third tranche of a CMO. ~ Michael Lewis

Thus the only Goldman Sachs employee arrested by the FBI in the aftermath of a financial crisis Goldman had done so much to fuel was the employee Goldman asked the FBI to arrest. ~ Michael Lewis

He said they wanted a place where they could just sit and talk to each other all day long without the distraction of a university," said Slovic ~ Michael Lewis

the utilitarians. They were interested only in the computer's crude and brutish ability to impose its will on the world around it. ~ Michael Lewis

Buy potatoes," he said. "Gotta hop." Then he hung up. Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes. Perhaps a few folks other than potato farmers think of the price of potatoes in America minutes after the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Russian, but I have never met them. ~ Michael Lewis

The fuses had been lit and could not be extinguished. All that remained was to observe the speed of the spark, and the size of the explosions. ~ Michael Lewis

If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they would have vanished long ago. This woman wasn't saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying that they were stupid. ~ Michael Lewis

What do you mean there is no bathrobe in my suite??!! ~ Michael Lewis

The incentive for the outsider is to attack the system right up to the moment he is co-opted by it. The incentive for the insider -and this took some getting used to- is to allow yourself to be attacked, and then co-opt your most ferocious attackers, and their best ideas. The effect on the system as a whole is to make it more stable, because everyone winds up working on its behalf. ~ Michael Lewis

This preternatural love of rules almost for their own sake punctuates German finance as it does German life. As it happens, a story had just broken that a German reinsurance company called Munich Re, back in June 2007, or just before the crash, had sponsored a party for its best producers that offered not just chicken dinners and nearest-to-the-pin golf competitions but a blowout with prostitutes in a public bath. In finance, high or low, this sort of thing is of course not unusual. What was striking was how organized the German event was. The company tied white and yellow and red ribbons to the prostitutes to indicate which ones were available to which men. After each sexual encounter the prostitute received a stamp on her arm to indicate how often she had been used. The Germans didn't just want hookers: they wanted hookers with rules. ~ Michael Lewis

Did I think I was doing God's work?" he said later. "No. But I did think market efficiency was something important for the economy. ~ Michael Lewis

Germans longed to be near shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis. ~ Michael Lewis

But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes. ~ Michael Lewis

One piece of bad luck was rapid technical change, which was a weapon that oddball upstarts could use against the enormous gray corporations. ~ Michael Lewis

By early 2009 the risks and losses associated with more than a trillion dollars' worth of bad investments were transferred from big Wall Street firms to the U.S. taxpayer. ~ Michael Lewis

There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble's inflation. One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud ... . ~ Michael Lewis

Vision, the challenge of the next century, the new millennium, the road ahead. ~ Michael Lewis

People with Asperger's couldn't control what they were interested in. It was a stroke of luck that his special interest was financial markets and not, say, collecting lawn mower catalogues. ~ Michael Lewis

It's taboo," he said. "When they ask you why you want to be an investment banker, you're supposed to talk about the challenges, and the thrill of doing deals, and the excitement of working with such high-calibre people, but never, ever mention money. ~ Michael Lewis

I recall that one of the first investment bankers I met taught me a poem. God gave you eyes, plagiarize. A ~ Michael Lewis

What's amazing is that they make a market in this fantasy stuff," said Druskin. "It's not a real asset. ~ Michael Lewis

Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know. ~ Michael Lewis

Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was buy Ireland. From each other. An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Irish bank losses have been the most prescient, has made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that puts the property-related losses of all Irish banks at roughly 106 billion euros. (Think $10.6 trillion.) At the rate money flows into the Irish treasury, Irish bank losses alone would absorb every penny of Irish taxes for the next four years. ~ Michael Lewis

I was gonna put him on the bus ... I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home. ~ Michael Lewis

The most appealing companies became those in a state of pure possibility. ~ Michael Lewis

The vicious cycle that is bringing down European states is not going to hit USA, at least not for a while, at the level of the federal government. The same cannot be said of state and local governments. ~ Michael Lewis

All these exquisitely schooled, sophisticated people, each and every one of whom feels special, are presented with two mainly horrible ways to earn a living: trawler fishing and aluminum smelting. ~ Michael Lewis

It's one thing to bet on red or black and know that you are betting on red or black. It's another to bet on a form of red and not to know it. ~ Michael Lewis

Wall Street bond trading desks, staffed by people making seven figures a year, set out o coax from the brain-dead guys making high five figures the highest possible ratings for the worst possible loans. They performed the task with Ivy League thoroughness and efficiency. ~ Michael Lewis

The very first day, we said, 'There's going to come a time when we're going to make a fortune shorting this stuff. It's going to blow up. We just don't know how or when. ~ Michael Lewis

Only a psychological freak could approach a 100-mph fastball aimed not all that far from his head with total confidence. "Lenny ~ Michael Lewis

Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification. Amos's ~ Michael Lewis

I appreciate this, but I just want to know one thing: How are you going to fuck me? ~ Michael Lewis

No partnership, for that matter, would have hired me, or anyone remotely like me. Was there ever any correlation between an ability to get into, and out of, Princeton, and a talent for taking financial risk? At ~ Michael Lewis

Moses could have walked in the door, and if he said he came from fixed income, Vinny wouldn't have trusted him, ~ Michael Lewis

Which Wall Street big shots Eisman had insulted was a matter of which Wall Street big shots' presence Eisman was allowed into. ~ Michael Lewis

The problems that had been Obama's problems for the past eight years were about to become Trump's problems. But his people didn't seem to want to know about them. ~ Michael Lewis

The first thing you learn on the trading floor is that when large numbers of people are after the same commodity, be it a stock, a bond, or a job, the commodity quickly becomes overvalued. ~ Michael Lewis

The people in a position to resolve the financial crisis were, of course, the very same people who had failed to foresee it: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, future Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, and so on. A few Wall Street CEOs had been fired for their roles in the subprime mortgage catastrophe, but most remained in their jobs, and they, of all people, became important characters operating behind the closed doors, trying to figure out what to do next. With them were a handful of government officials - the same government officials who should have known a lot more about what Wall Street firms were doing, back when they were doing it. All shared a distinction: They had proven far less capable of grasping basic truths in the heart of the U.S. financial system than a one-eyed money manager with Asperger's syndrome. ~ Michael Lewis

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

(Post Katrina) . . . He was reminded of the first time he'd run on a track with spikes. "You just fly on the track." The poor kids he saw in New Orleans were trying to run the same race in life that he was. But he was wearing spikes and they weren't. "There's a real idealism that you have to indulge to think that people in New Orleans were now going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. There were no bootstraps. ~ Michael Lewis

Senior managers at the Royal Bank of Canada were now arguing that the bank should create a Canadian dark pool, route their Canadian customers' stock market orders into it, and then sell to high-frequency traders the right to operate inside the dark pool. Brad thought that it made a lot more sense for RBC simply to expose the new game for what it was, and perhaps establish themselves as the only broker on Wall Street not conspiring to screw investors. "The only card left to play was honesty," as Rob Park put it. ~ Michael Lewis

I'm a big Michael Lewis fan. That said, my favorite Lewis book was 'The Blind Side.' ~ Bart Chilton

He wore the same shorts and t-shirts to work for days on end. He refused to wear shoes with laces. He refused to wear watches or even his wedding ring. To calm himself at work he often blared heavy metal music. ~ Michael Lewis

After the markets closed Vinny would get into his Cadillac and drive out to his big house in Long Island. Now there is the guy called Vladimir who gets into his jet and flies to his estate in Aspen for the weekend. I used to worry a little about Vinny. Now I worry a lot about Vladimir. ~ Michael Lewis

Debt ownership in a shaky enterprise means control, for when a company fails to meet its interest payments, a bondholder can foreclose and liquidate the company. ~ Michael Lewis

The fact that it is such an opaque industry should be alarming," Brad said. "The fact that the people who make the most money want the least clarity possible - that should be alarming, too. ~ Michael Lewis

A new trader could leap into a market and trade frantically inside it without adding anything of value to it. ~ Michael Lewis

You want the book to be special, and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you are not pressing to write a book. ~ Michael Lewis

All of a sudden the market is all about algos and routers. ~ Michael Lewis

That's all right," says Billy. "We're blending what we see but we aren't allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see. ~ Michael Lewis

The sensors measured everything that Clark could think to measure, including the pressure on the engine. They passed these measurements up to the programmable logic controllers. The ~ Michael Lewis

The shareholders who financed the risk taking had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and, as the risk taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished. All that was clear was 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

And you'd see that 2/28 interest only ARM mortgages were only 5.85% of the pool in early 2004, but by late 2004 they were 17.48% of the pool, and by late summer 2005 25.34% of the pool. Yet average FICO [consumer credit] scores for the pool, percent of no-doc ["Liar"] loan to value measures and other indicators were pretty static ... . The point is that these measures could stay roughly static, but the overall pool of mortgages being issued, packaged and sold off was worsening in quality, because for the same average FICO scores or the same average loan to value, you were getting a higher percentage of interest only mortgages. ~ Michael Lewis

Looking for bad bonds inside a CDO was like fishing for crap in a Port-O-Let: The question wasn't whether you'd catch some but how quickly you'd be satisfied you'd caught enough. ~ Michael Lewis

You could argue the banks are much better capitalised than they were going into the crisis, and everyone's in a much more vigilant state because they still remember the crisis. ~ Michael Lewis

Complicated financial stuff was being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it. ~ Michael Lewis

How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation? He tried, but his English in-laws just looked at him strangely. They understood that someone else had just lost a great deal of money and Ben had just made a great deal of money, but never got much past that. "I can't really talk to them about it," he says. "They're English. ~ Michael Lewis

I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel. ~ Michael Lewis

Each firm held its rope; one by one, they realized that no matter how strongly they pulled, the balloon would eventually lift them off their feet. ~ Michael Lewis

It was not that he lacked values, but he had a keen sense that at times the ends justified the means, and an equally keen sense of his own interests. There ~ Michael Lewis

Eisman was now explaining why the world was going to blow up, but his partners were only half-listening ... because the financial world was blowing up. ~ Michael Lewis

There's no point in arguing with partisan supporters. Their views are their identity. Nothing you can tell the most phlegmatic follower. ~ Michael Lewis

Clark liked to say that human beings, when they took risks, fell into one of two types, pigs or chickens. "The difference between these two kinds of people," he'd say, "is the difference between the pig and the chicken in the ham-and-eggs breakfast. The chicken is interested, the pig is committed. If you are going to do anything worth doing, you need a lot of pigs." The ~ Michael Lewis

Every form of strength is also a form of weakness," he once wrote. "Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say. ~ Michael Lewis

The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged, ~ Michael Lewis

Silicon Valley is to the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world. ~ Michael Lewis

rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine ~ 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

There was a lot of angst about it. It was sort of viewed as, These folks don't know what they're talking about. If losses go to ten percent there will be, like, a million homeless people." (Losses in the pools Hubler's group had bet on would eventually reach 40 percent.) As a senior Morgan Stanley executive outside Hubler's group put it, "They didn't want to show you the results. They kept saying, That state of the world can't happen." It ~ Michael Lewis

The world of "preserving" that wealth. He had no interest in preservation of any sort. ~ Michael Lewis

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

Now, obviously, Meredith Whitney didn't sink Wall Street. She'd just expressed most clearly and most loudly a view that turned out to be far more seditious to the social order than, say, the many campaigns by various New York attorneys general against Wall Street corruption. If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they would have vanished long ago. This woman wasn't saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying that they were stupid. These people whose job it was to allocate capital apparently didn't even know how to manage their own. ~ Michael Lewis

Donnie Green himself had been a trader at Salomon Brothers in the dark ages, when traders had more hair on their chests than on their heads. ~ Michael Lewis

Theirs was a union of the weirdly like-minded. ~ Michael Lewis

Microsoft was twelve years old before people started talking about Microsoft millionaires; Netscape was one and a half. ~ Michael Lewis

Wall Street investment banks are like Las Vegas casinos: They set the odds. The customer who plays zero-sum games against them may win from time to time but never systematically, and never so spectacularly that he bankrupts the casino. ~ Michael Lewis

The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn't teach us anything. ~ Michael Lewis

The difference in Billy wasn't what had happened to him, but what hadn't. He had a life he hadn't led, and he knew it. He just hoped nobody else noticed. ~ Michael Lewis

Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice. ~ Michael Lewis

The way it feels to me,' he said, 'is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think. And now I can think them. ~ Michael Lewis

Never mind that you weren't actually making money - there'd be time for that later, assuming someone eventually figured out how to make money from the Internet. For the moment you needed to plow all of your revenues back into growth. You had to show that you were the company not of the present but of the future. ~ Michael Lewis

The Germans made just about every bad investment you could have made. 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

There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn't? ~ Michael Lewis