Michael Lewis Quotes

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

Why isn't someone smarter than us doing this?

It was neither healthy nor good when public stock exchanges introduced order types and speed advantages that high-frequency traders could use to exploit everyone else. This sort of inefficiency didn't vanish the moment it was spotted and acted upon. It was like a broken slot machine in the casino that pays off every time. It would keep paying off until someone said something about it; but no one who played the slot machine had any interest in pointing out that it was broken.

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.

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

Great stories happen to those who can tell them.

The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.

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.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.

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.

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.

You see, I'm the event. I am the news

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.

You will be fierce. You will fearless. And you will make work you know in your heart is not as good as you want it to be.

The role had been spawned by the widespread belief that traders didn’t know how to talk to computer geeks and that computer geeks did not respond rationally to big, hairy traders hollering at them.