Michael Lewis Quotations

One reason we've seen a decline in the past few years is that going to the movies isn't as special as it used to be. People have big screens and good sound at home. Why would they leave if you don't offer more than that?

But there was no player on whom his mind naturally fixed. The only person in the organization whose riddance would make him happier was his manager, Art Howe. It wasn't long before he had a novel idea: trade Art.

What we've seen since the beginning of January is that the futures market is increasing the possibility of an oil price spike before the end of the year.

Market deficits will sustain upside price moves through 2007. Zinc is catching up -- it was the laggard.

I think we were a little better at the end. We just ran out of time. We just got beat.

The A's are held to the standard of the Yankees in a funny kind of way. That if they don't win the World Series it is regarded as a failure.

There are enough books in the world. You want to write the ones that are good. The minute you write books because you need the income not because you think you have a good subject, you should just stop. There are sixty thousand books published in this country every year, and most of them are crap.

We probably won't need a rate rise now until September,

We'd like to see the Board of Governors endorse this collaborative project that we're sending forward.

You have two great defensive teams out here tonight and we wanted to come out here and show them that we are one of the best defensive teams in the league,

Bruce and I both put $50 in a bank account. That's how we started the company.

We are expecting new money to come in.

You're teaching residents out there. At the same time, we estimate that we will be providing dental services to tens of thousands of people every year.

Why pay $20 million to Harrison Ford? I don't even understand that. They think they have to do it... If someone puts a price on himself, that suggests he is irreplaceable, then he better find somewhere else to work.

I'm the one who brought those two together,

If you like crafty stuff they are going to open the market for crafty people. When Jaime Moyer of the Seattle Mariners pitches, I love watching him. In a way it is a much more interesting game than watching Randy Johnson pitch. You are not only watching a game you are watching a thought process.

In terms of transportation, Jerry Kilgore had a plan,

The bottom line is we are committed to fulfilling everything we agreed to do. People need to recognize there are budget limitations, and we need to be prudent about how we spend our money.

The idea is to keep top faculty in North Carolina. There will be some things they will teach back and forth.

It's a patently unfair game that $40 million has to play against $120 million. It just violates all of our notions of fairness that money is one of the determining factors in the outcome of a sporting contest.

The Oakland clubhouse is a wonderful place. A lot of these guys feel like rejects. They were rejects and they feel - they can tell you how baseball screwed up.

The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.

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.

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.

Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

When you're trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.

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.

People really don't like to hear success explained away as luck, especially successful people. As they age and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There's a reason for this. The world doesn't want to acknowledge it either. Don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that you have had success, you have also had luck. And with luck comes obligation.

As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.

A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

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.

The model used by Wall Street to price trillions of dollar's worth of derivatives thought of the financial world as an orderly, continuous process. But the world was not continuous; it changed discontinuously, and often by accident.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions--if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong.

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

There's something bad in everything good and something good in everything bad.

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.

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.

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

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.

He's a machine for competitive balance, ... Yes, the money is in New York. Yes, the money is in his hands. But he squanders money. Thank God for it.

He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.

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.

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.

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

A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.

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.

The institutions at the centre of capitalism are bigger than they've ever been, the pay is much greater, the ability of society to get its arms around it is much less. The political clout of the financial class is unbelievable. I'd say the story is darker than when I was there. When I was there it felt like a comedy - and now it feels more like a tragedy.

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 Moulin Rouge is, like the West Village and the Nasdaq, one of those places that people who don't like to take risks come to for the thrill of being on the spot where risks once were taken.

The reason the Greeks don't pay taxes is they don't trust where their taxes are going, because they know these other Greeks are taking money from the state for doing nothing. It's an essentially corrupt society.

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.

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.

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.

If you had to point to one thing that made it less likely that the Red Sox would win the World Series, I would say it was those people that go to Fenway Park to watch the games. And then the media around it.

Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.

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.

I think that fans are always looking for someone to blame. Wouldn't it be nice if they looked in the mirror?

That was how a Salomon bond trader thought: He forgot whatever it was that he wanted to do for a minute and put his finger on the pulse of the market. If the market felt fidgety, if people were scared or desperate, he herded them like sheep into a corner, then made them pay for their uncertainty. He sat on the market until it puked gold coins. Then he worried about what he wanted to do.

My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.

That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.

Thirdly-but not lastly-there was the bias toward what people saw with their own eyes, or thought they had seen. The human mind played tricks on itself when it relied exclusively on what it saw. There was a lot you couldn't see when you watched a game

People who think they know what they are talking about when they talk about baseball include the announcers and all of the sports press - no matter how much evidence you present them to the contrary they will continue to think that what they think is right.

I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.

Some coaches believed they could judge a player's performance simply by watching it. In this they were deeply mistaken. The naked eye was an inadequate tool for learning what you needed to know to evaluate baseball players and baseball games. Think about it. 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 difference between a good hitter and an average hitter is simply not visible-it is a matter of record

What happens when we acknowledge the sovereignty and power of God without trusting in His goodness and faithfulness? A pitcher who saw God's power behind his extremely unlikely rise to the big leagues wondered if, at any difficulty he encountered there, God might be taking his ability away.

Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .

I procrastinate to a point where I'm filled with self-loathing and then I start writing. It's usually a state of self-loathing that gets me going.

In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.

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

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.

Why pay $20 million to Harrison Ford? I dont even understand that. They think they have to do it... If someone puts a price on himself, that suggests he is irreplaceable, then he better find somewhere else to work.

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

Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.

The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.

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.

Like Adam, formed from clay, children are formed from the biological material of which they are made or by the hands of their parents.

Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.

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.

If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.

People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.

There used to be this guy called Vinny who worked on the floor of the stock exchange, said one big investor who had observed the market for a long time. 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

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.

The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too.

At SGI board meetings... Jim Clark's face would get red and he'd start shouting that an investor and board member had cheated him and his engineers.

I don't think there is a national pasttime. Watching TV is a national pasttime. Really. If there is a national pasttime, it is watching TV.

Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.

There has been this - and it's reflected in the broadcasts - this moronic use of statistics. Which has suggested to everyone who is intelligent the use of statistics is moronic.

When the last history of high-frequency trading is written, Hunsader, like Joe Saluzzi and Sal Arnuk of Themis Trading, deserves a prominent place in it.

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?

We change for the good so long as good exists around us.

The Red Sox are a curious thing because so much here is media driven. You can't go fire half your scouts here because they are all friends with the local reporters. Your life is going to hell in the papers.

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.