Michael Lewis Quotes & Sayings

When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret. — Michael Lewis

WHEN HE WAS a young man Billy Beane could beat anyone at anything. — Michael Lewis

The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is as early as fifty-five for men and fifty for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than six hundred Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, writers, musicians, and on and on and on. — Michael Lewis

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

Much is made of a kind heart," he said. "I'm more of a feed-yourself-or-die kind of guy. — 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

Ronan, for his part, couldn't quite believe how ordinary the people on Wall Street were. "It's a whole industry of bullshit," he said. — Michael Lewis

Why isn't someone smarter than us doing this? — 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

Whatever that guy is buying, I want to short it. — 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

The "consumer loan" piles that Wall Street firms, led by Goldman Sachs, asked AIG FP to insure went from being 2 percent subprime mortgages to being 95 percent subprime mortgages. In a matter of months, AIG FP, in effect, bought $50 billion in triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds by insuring them against default. — Michael Lewis

Because his memory is so selective, he has no scars from prior experience, said Vinny. — Michael Lewis

If you ever care to see how all the world's most awful jokes spread, spend a day on a bond trading desk. When the Challenger space shuttle disintegrated, six people called me from six points on the globe to explain that NASA stands for Need Another Seven Astronauts. — Michael Lewis

Holding one's self responsible is a critical feature in stigma and in the generation of shame since violation of standards, rules, and goals are insufficient in its elicitation unless responsibility can be placed on the self. Stigma may differ from other elicitors of shame and guilt, in part because it is a social appearance factor. The degree to which the stigma is socially apparent is the degree to which one must negotiate the issue of blame, not only for one's self but between one's self and the other who is witness to the stigma. Stigmatization is a much more powerful elicitor of shame and guilt in that it requires a negotiation not only between one's self and one's attributions, but between one's self and the attributions of others. — Michael Lewis

It was as if he had been assigned to take apart a fiendishly complicated alarm clock to see why it wasn't working, only to discover that an important part of the clock was inside his own mind. — Michael Lewis

Capitalism's machinery favored these capitalists as it had never favored anyone else in its history. — Michael Lewis

After Gell-Man was done, Amos said, "You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are. — Michael Lewis

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

If you challenge conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.
Bill James — Michael Lewis

The programmers decided the steps everyone on board Hyperion would need to take to do everything from dimming the lights to raising the sails. — Michael Lewis

Irish people will tell you that, because of their sad history of dispossession, owning a home is not just a way to avoid paying rent but a mark of freedom. In their rush to freedom, the Irish built their own prisons. And their leaders helped them to do it. — Michael Lewis

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 undervalued, who couldn't? Bad as they may have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn't play baseball for a living. — Michael Lewis

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

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

It's hard to know how people select a course in life," Amos said. "The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits. — Michael Lewis

Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn't mean it wasn't a good book. It was a very good book. — Michael Lewis

To Redelmeier the very idea that there was a great deal of uncertainty in medicine went largely unacknowledged by its authorities. There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error. The entire profession had arranged itself as if to confirm the wisdom of its decisions. — Michael Lewis

there is no name for what he's looking for, which, typically, is a technology, or an idea, on the cusp of commercial viability. The new new thing. — Michael Lewis

Worried that it needed to do more to promote diversity, RBC invited Brad along with a bunch of other nonwhite people to a meeting to discuss the issue. Going around the table, people took turns responding to a request to "talk about your experience of being a minority at RBC." When Brad's turn came he said, "To be honest, the only time I've ever felt like a minority is this exact moment. If you really want to encourage diversity you shouldn't make people feel like a minority." Then he left. The group continued to meet without him. — Michael Lewis

Household was making loans at a faster pace than ever. A big source of its growth had been the second mortgage. The document offered a fifteen-year, fixed-rate loan, but it was bizarrely disguised as a thirty-year loan. It took the stream of payments the homeowner would make to Household over fifteen years, spread it hypothetically over thirty years, and asked: If you were making the same dollar payments over thirty years that you are in fact making over fifteen, what would your "effective rate" of interest be? It was a weird, dishonest sales pitch. The borrower was told he had an "effective interest rate of 7 percent" when he was in fact paying something like 12.5 percent. "It was blatant fraud," said Eisman. "They were tricking their customers. — 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

A Home without Equity Is Just a Rental with Debt, — Michael Lewis

Corporate finance, which services the corporations and governments that borrow money, and that are known as "clients," is, by comparison, a refined and unworldly place. Because they don't risk money, corporate financiers are considered wimps by traders. — 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

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

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

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. — 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

On Wall Street, the lawyers play the same role as medics in war: They come in after the shooting is over to clean up the mess. — Michael Lewis

Many sentences popped out of Amos's mouth that Redelmeier knew he would forever remember: A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said. The difference between being very smart and very foolish is often very small. So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative. The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place. Redelmeier — Michael Lewis

Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called hidden people - or, to put it more plainly, elves - in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free, but, as he put it, we couldn't as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people. — Michael Lewis

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

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

There are several insights at the heart of the A's system that I think are wonderful for baseball. One, that it's a team game. That no one player is going to make that much of a difference to your team, so for god's sake don't go blow a quarter of your budget on one guy. — Michael Lewis

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours — Michael Lewis

March 2008 the stock market had finally grasped what every mortgage bond salesman had long known: Someone had lost at least $240 billion. But who? Morgan Stanley still owned $13 billion or so in CDOs, courtesy of Howie Hubler. The idiots in Germany owned some, Wing Chau and CDO managers like him owned some — Michael Lewis

I have a job to do. Make money for my clients. Period. But boy it gets morbid when you start making investments that work out extra great if a tragedy occurs. — Michael Lewis

The smaller the sample size, the more likely that it is unrepresentative of the wider population..."people can be taught the correct rule, perhaps even with little difficulty. The point remains that people do not follow the correct rule, when left to their own devices. — Michael Lewis

I hated discussing ideas with investors," he said, "because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process." Once you became an idea's defender you had a harder time changing your mind about it. — Michael Lewis

The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran major league baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games. — Michael Lewis

He shouted into the phone, "That is fuckin' awesome. I mean fuckin' awesome. I fuckin' mean fucking awesome. You are one Big Swinging Dick, and don't ever let anybody tell you different." It brought tears to my eyes to hear it, to be called a Big Swinging Dick by the man who, years ago, had given birth to the distinction and in my mind had the greatest right to confer it upon me. — Michael Lewis

He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it. — Michael Lewis

He walked around the Las Vegas casino incredulous at the spectacle before him: seven thousand people, all of whom seemed delighted with the world as they found it. A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems, and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen. — Michael Lewis

In America, even the homeless were profligate. Back in Toronto, after a big bank dinner, Brad would gather the leftovers into covered tin trays and carry them out to a homeless guy he saw every day on his way to work. The guy was always appreciative. When the bank moved him to New York, he saw more homeless people in a day than he saw back home in a year. When no one was watching, he'd pack up the king's banquet of untouched leftovers after the NY lunches and walk it down to the people on the streets. "They just looked at me like, 'What the fuck is this guy doing?'" he said. "I stopped doing it because it didn't feel like anyone gave a shit. — Michael Lewis

Many thrifts layered a billion dollars of brand-new loans on top of their existing, disastrous hundred million dollars of old loss-making loans, in a hope that the new would offset the old. Each new purchase of mortgage bonds (which was identical to making a loan) was like the last act of a desperate man. The strategy was wildly irresponsible, for the fundamental problem (borrowing short term and lending long term) hadn't been remedied. The hypergrowth only meant that the next thrift crisis would be larger. But the thrift managers were not thinking that far in advance. They were simply trying to keep the door to the shop open. That explains why thrifts continued to buy mortgage bonds even as they sold their loans. — Michael Lewis

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. — Michael Lewis

Eisman was quick to see narratives, he explained the world in stories, and this was one of the stories he used to explain himself. The — Michael Lewis

He wasn't cruel. He wasn't even rude, at least not intentionally. He simply evoked extreme feelings in others. — Michael Lewis

Back in 1995, Munger had given a talk at Harvard Business School called "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment." If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives. FedEx couldn't get its night shift to finish on time; they tried everything to speed it up but nothing worked - until they stopped paying night shift workers by the hour and started to pay them by the shift. Xerox created a new, better machine only to have it sell less well than the inferior older ones - until they figured out the salesmen got a bigger commission for selling the older one. "Well, you can say, 'Everybody knows that,'" said Munger. "I think I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther." Munger's — Michael Lewis

There was of course no point in trying to monitor Eisman. He saw himself as a crusader, a champion of the underdog, an enemy of sinister authority. He saw himself, roughly speaking, as Spider-Man. — Michael Lewis

In the two decades after I left, I waited for the end of Wall Street as I had known it. The outrageous bonuses, the endless parade of rogue traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and finished off Salomon Brothers, the crisis following the collapse of my old boss John Meriwether's Long-Term Capital Management, the Internet bubble: Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces? — Michael Lewis

If the incarceration experience doesn't break your spirit, it changes you in a way that you lose many fears. You begin to realize that your life is not ruled by your ego and ambition and that it can end any day at any time. So why worry? You learn that just like on the street, there is life in prison, and random people get there based on the jeopardy of the system. The prisons are filled by people who crossed the law, as well as by those who were incidentally and circumstantially picked and crushed by somebody else's agenda. On the other hand, as a vivid benefit, you become very much independent of material property and learn to appreciate very simple pleasures in life such as the sunlight and morning breeze. — 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

Steal from those beneath you; attack those above you. — Michael Lewis

Dark pools were another rogue spawn of the new financial marketplace. Private stock exchanges, run by the big brokers, they were not required to reveal to the public what happened inside them. They reported any trade they executed, but they did so with sufficient delay that it was impossible to know exactly what was happening in the broader market at the moment the trade occurred. — 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

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

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. Or, rather, a unit of AIG called AIG FP. AIG Financial Products was created — Michael Lewis

The lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual. — Michael Lewis

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 — Michael Lewis

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

Before Volcker's speech, bonds had been conservative investments, into which investors put their savings when they didn't fancy a gamble in the stock market. After Volcker's speech, bonds became objects of speculation, a means of creating wealth rather than merely storing it. — Michael Lewis

Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem. — Michael Lewis

It was striking how little control we had of events, particularly in view of how assiduously we cultivated the appearance of being in charge by smoking big cigars and saying fuck all the time. — Michael Lewis

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

Event-driven investing: — Michael Lewis

Amos had wanted to be a poet when he was a boy. He'd wound up a scientist. Danny was a poet, who somehow happened to have become a scientist. — Michael Lewis

The creation of the mortgage bond market, a decade earlier, had extended Wall Street into a place it had never before been: the debts of ordinary Americans. — 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

When someone says something, don't ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of." That — 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

Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system ... Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said. — Michael Lewis

Ratings in the NFL. Then Kemp, too, was injured. His replacement was a fellow named Mike Moroski, so obscure that any question concerning his NFL career would be considered out of bounds in a game of Trivial Pursuit. Moroski had been with the 49ers for exactly two weeks before he became, by default, their starting quarterback. He completed 57.5 percent of his passes. Eventually people must have noticed. As Walsh performed miracle after miracle with his quarterbacks, — Michael Lewis

If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer's pocket was a dollar in ours, and vice versa. — Michael Lewis

I also immediately internalized the idea that no school could teach someone how to be a great investor. If it were true, it'd be the most popular school in the world, with an impossibly high tuition. So it must not be true. Investing — Michael Lewis

As a rule, any loan that had been turned into an acronym or abbreviation could more clearly be called a "subprime loan," but the bond market didn't want to be clear. — Michael Lewis

Nothing short of the U.S. government could save them. — Michael Lewis

Best definition of "investing" is "gambling with the odds in your favor." The people on the short side of the subprime mortgage market had gambled with the odds in their favor. The people on the other side - the entire financial system, essentially - had gambled with the odds against them. — Michael Lewis

It was the job of people like me to make up reasons, to spin a plausible yarn. And it's amazing what people will believe. Heavy selling out of the Middle East was an old standby. Since no one ever had any clue what the Arabs were doing with their money or why, no story involving Arabs could ever be refuted. So if you didn't know why the dollar was falling, you shouted out something about Arabs. — Michael Lewis

But she kept saying how brilliant he was. And he's all she talked about. And I fell in love with the image my cousin had of Mokund Thapa. I wanted to be like Mokund Thapa. One — Michael Lewis

By accident, some traders had stumbled across a route controlled by Verizon that took 14.65 milliseconds. "The Gold Route," the traders called it, because on the occasions you happened to find yourself on it you were the first to exploit the discrepancies between prices in Chicago and prices in New York. — Michael Lewis

His life was dedicated to the fine art of tearing down and building anew. — Michael Lewis

We fought with those cocksuckers all the way down," says one Deutsche Bank trader. And, all the way down, the debt collectors at Deutsche Bank sensed the bond traders at Morgan Stanley misunderstood their own trade. They weren't lying; they genuinely failed to understand the nature of the subprime CDO. — Michael Lewis

I have this theory," says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache Securities. "Wall Street makes its best producers into
managers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made a
manager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and often
neurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers, and they go
after each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts that
producing gave them. They usually aren't well suited to be managers.
Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another quarter get
muscled out because of politics. The guys left behind are just the most
ruthless of the bunch. That's why there are cycles on Wall Street - why
Salomon Brothers is getting crunched now - because the ruthless people
are bad for the business but can only be washed out by proven failure. — 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

automated voices and the bells from the row of testing machines in the back. The walls were white cinder block, the floors speckled linoleum. At the front desk were four large black ladies. Leigh Anne handed all the documents over to one of them, who took one look at them and said in a slow drawl, "Uh-uh. This school — Michael Lewis

Unpleasant odor wafting from the subprime mortgage industry that Eisman had detected. These companies disclosed their ever-growing earnings, but not much else. One of the many items they failed to disclose was the delinquency rate of the home loans they were making. — Michael Lewis