Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Back in 1996, 65 percent of subprime loans had been fixed-rate, meaning that typical subprime borrowers might be getting screwed, but at least they knew for sure how much they owed each month until they paid off the loan. By 2005, 75 percent of subprime loans were some form of floating-rate, usually fixed for the first two years.”

— Michael Lewis

202. “These people believed that the collapse of the subprime mortgage market was unlikely precisely because it would be such a catastrophe. Nothing so terrible could ever actually happen. The.”

— Michael Lewis

203. “The rating agencies, who were paid fat fees by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for each deal they rated, pronounced 80 percent of the new tower of debt triple-A.”

— Michael Lewis

204. “Meriwether spent his entire day avoiding dumb bets, and he wasn’t about to accept this one.”

— Michael Lewis

205. “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

206. “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

207. “There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn’t between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money.”

— Michael Lewis

208. “It’s not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria – to believe that most of what’s in the financial news is wrong, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded – without being insane.”

— Michael Lewis

209. “My biggest concern is the misuse of science to support policies.”

— Michael Lewis

210. “The purpose was to extend credit to less and less creditworthy homeowners, not so that they might buy a house but so that they could cash out whatever equity they had in the house they already owned.”

— Michael Lewis

211. “When something becomes obvious to you,” he said, “you immediately think surely someone else is doing this.”

— Michael Lewis

212. “After the war Avi, by then twenty-two years old, finally decided what he would study: psychology. Had you asked him just then why he picked psychology, “I would say I want to understand the human soul. Not the mind. The soul.”

— Michael Lewis

213. “You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything all at once. That’s when you need to stop and check your thinking... Beware of the delirious guy in the emergency unit with the long history of alcoholism, because you will say, ‘He’s just drunk,’ and you’ll miss the subdural hematoma.”

— Michael Lewis

214. “Microsoft was twelve years old before people started talking about Microsoft millionaires; Netscape was one and a half.”

— Michael Lewis

215. “He still had the Dutch habit of laughing at whatever you told him, just in case it happened to be a joke.”

— Michael Lewis

216. “It was a measure of how much money people were making in the bond market that the magazine Institutional Investor was about to create a hot list of people who worked in it, called The 20 Rising Stars of Fixed Income. It was a measure of how much money people.”

— Michael Lewis

217. “It’s Groundhog Day,” said Max. “The new people come in and think that the previous administration and the civil service are lazy or stupid. Then they actually get to know the place they are managing. And when they leave they say, ‘This was a really hard job, and those are the best people I’ve ever worked with.’ This happens over and over and over.”

— Michael Lewis

218. “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.”

— Michael Lewis

219. “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

220. “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.”

— Michael Lewis

221. “The vicious cycle that is bringing down European states is not going to hit USA, at least not for a while, at the level of the federal government. The same cannot be said of state and local governments.”

— Michael Lewis

222. “There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.”

— Michael Lewis

223. “There is nothing more satisfying to me,” he said, “than to create a complete self-contained world when a computer is controlling it.”

— Michael Lewis

224. “He had little patience for the mystical, spiritual approach of computer programming.”

— Michael Lewis

225. “I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,′ Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by ‘Value Theory.’ ‘A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts ‘irrational behavior’ if the behavior in question is in fact observed.”

— Michael Lewis

226. “The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. “Confirmation.”

— Michael Lewis

227. “Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself.”

— Michael Lewis

228. “The ability of Wall Street traders to see themselves in their success and their management in their failure would later be echoed, when their firms, which disdained the need for government regulation in good times, insisted on being rescued by government in bad times. Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.”

— Michael Lewis

229. “The moment Salomon Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had from turning an investment bank into a public corporation and leveraging its balance sheet with exotic risks, the psychological foundations of Wall Street shifted, from trust to blind faith.”

— Michael Lewis

230. “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

231. “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

232. “They hired a PhD student from the statistics department at the University of California at Berkeley to help them, but he quit after they asked him to study the market for pork belly futures. “It turned out that he was a vegetarian,” said Jamie. “He had a problem with capitalism in general, but the pork bellies pushed him over the edge.”

— Michael Lewis

233. “With stagnant wages and booming consumption, the cash-strapped American masses had a virtually unlimited demand for loans but an uncertain ability to repay them.”

— Michael Lewis

234. “When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,′ Amos liked to say. ‘Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.”

— Michael Lewis

235. “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

236. “The presence of millions of small investors had politicized the stock market. It had been legislated and regulated to at least seem fair.”

— Michael Lewis

237. “That was Eisman’s logic: the logic of Wall Street’s pecking order. Goldman Sachs was the big kid who ran the games in this neighborhood. Merrill Lynch was the little fat kid assigned the least pleasant roles, just happy to be a part of things.”

— Michael Lewis

238. “The way the creative process works is that you first say something, and later, sometimes years later, you understand what you said.”

— Michael Lewis

239. “If a hurricane is another night in a bad marriage, a tornado is a blind date.”

— Michael Lewis

240. “The subprime mortgage market had a special talent for obscuring what needed to be clarified.”

— Michael Lewis

241. “The financial markets paid a lot of people extremely well for narrow expertise and a few people, poorly, for the big, global views you needed to have if you were to allocate capital across markets.”

— Michael Lewis

242. “The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction.”

— Michael Lewis

243. “The shareholders who financed the risk taking had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and, as the risk taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished. All that was clear was 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

244. “In 2008 it was the entire financial system that was at risk. We were still short. But you don’t want the system to crash. It’s sort of like the flood’s about to happen and you’re Noah. You’re on the ark. Yeah, you’re okay. But you are not happy looking out at the flood. That’s not a happy moment for Noah.” By.”

— Michael Lewis

245. “Courage is a muscle memory. The tallest oak in the forest was once just a little nut that held its ground.”

— Michael Lewis

246. “The politicians in Ireland speak Gaelic the way the Real Housewives of Orange County speak French.”

— Michael Lewis

247. “Maybe the mind’s best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things. Over.”

— Michael Lewis

248. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “‘Where are the ratings agencies in all this?’ And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a physical reaction because they didn’t want to say it. It was a smirk.”

— Michael Lewis

249. “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

250. “This was only one of many recent changes along the capitalist food chain. Wall Street had gone from being the celebrities of the money culture to being its lackeys.”

— Michael Lewis