Michael Lewis (author) quotes

A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans. (Michael Lewis (author))
The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it's comforting; because it's so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.
Michael Lewis (author)
The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.
Michael Lewis (author)
Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.
Michael Lewis (author)
The sentimentality of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons.
Michael Lewis (author)
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 (author)
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 (author)
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 (author)
Someone out there was using the fact that stock market orders arrived at different times at different exchanges to front-run orders from one market to another.
Michael Lewis (author)
Why isn't someone smarter than us doing this?
Michael Lewis (author)
The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold. (Michael Lewis (author))
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 (author)
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 (author)
I think that fans are always looking for someone to blame. Wouldn't it be nice if they looked in the mirror?
Michael Lewis (author)
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 (author)
Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly.
Michael Lewis (author)
Even as late as the summer of 2006, as home prices began to fall, it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them-to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch.
Michael Lewis (author)
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 (author)
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 (author)
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 (author)
The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers. (Michael Lewis (author))
A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term.
Michael Lewis (author)
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 (author)
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 (author)
Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.
Michael Lewis (author)