Michael Lewis Quotes - Page 2

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.

Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly.

The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.

He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.

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.

One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.

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.

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.

The Irish turned in on themselves and bid up their own land prices in the most extraordinary ways... The Irish people stepped in and guaranteed the banks, and committed to repay sums they can't afford to repay, and essentially committed themselves to generations of suffering.

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.

People were paid lots of money to make stupid decisions, people in big banks, and when people are paid to be stupid they'll be stupid. The question was, did they know they were being stupid or were they just stupid? I think you need to take it on a case by case basis. There was some sinister activity, but I think by and by it was people being incentivised to do the wrong thing.

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.

The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged.

The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.