Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 9

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

253. “A tourist can’t help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.”

— Michael Lewis

254. “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

255. “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.”

— Michael Lewis

256. “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

257. “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.”

— Michael Lewis

258. “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

259. “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

260. “Each firm held its rope; one by one, they realized that no matter how strongly they pulled, the balloon would eventually lift them off their feet.”

— Michael Lewis

261. “The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It’s hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too.”

— Michael Lewis

262. “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

263. “The main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer the financial risk to the shareholders.”

— Michael Lewis

264. “Investing well was all about being paid the right price for risk.”

— Michael Lewis

265. “Steve’s fun to take to any Wall Street meeting,” said Vinny. “Because he’ll say ‘explain that to me’ thirty different times. Or ‘could you explain that more, in English?’ Because once you do that, there’s a few things you learn. For a start, you figure out if they even know what they’re talking about. And a lot of times they don’t!”

— Michael Lewis

266. “A man who can tell a good story can make a good living as a broker.”

— Michael Lewis

267. “People often work hard to obtain information they already have.”

— Michael Lewis

268. “Danny’s trading life was man versus man, but this felt more like man versus nature: The synthetic CDO had become a synthetic natural disaster.”

— Michael Lewis

269. “The problems that had been Obama’s problems for the past eight years were about to become Trump’s problems. But his people didn’t seem to want to know about them.”

— Michael Lewis

270. “If it doesn’t happen, it never was going to happen. If you never did it, it wasn’t there to begin with.”

— Michael Lewis

271. “Here was another way Israel was different from the United States: Its wars were short, and someone always won.”

— Michael Lewis

272. “Debt ownership in a shaky enterprise means control, for when a company fails to meet its interest payments, a bondholder can foreclose and liquidate the company.”

— Michael Lewis

273. “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.”

— Michael Lewis

274. “What’s fun is watching actors of that calibre bring them to life. It’s incredible. Christian Bale spent a day with the character he plays and after my year of being with him I couldn’t have generated the same view of him. They have a different way of looking at people, it’s fascinating to watch.”

— Michael Lewis

275. “The first thing you learn on the trading floor is that when large numbers of people are after the same commodity, be it a stock, a bond, or a job, the commodity quickly becomes overvalued.”

— Michael Lewis

276. “When asked the key to his success, he said, “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.”

— Michael Lewis

277. “If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they would have vanished long ago. This woman wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying that they were stupid.”

— Michael Lewis

278. “Knowledge is literally prediction,” said Morey. “Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally.”

— Michael Lewis

279. “They would learn to evaluate a decision not by its outcomes – whether it turned out to be right or wrong – but by the process that led to it. The job of the decision maker wasn’t to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.”

— Michael Lewis

280. “With every stroke of their keyboards they hacked a path through the forest that others would be required to follow.”

— Michael Lewis

281. “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?”

— Michael Lewis

282. “And who would deny that the consumer demand for ever more stuff at ever cheaper prices is one of the great deterministic forces in history?”

— Michael Lewis

283. “The fact that it is such an opaque industry should be alarming,” Brad said. “The fact that the people who make the most money want the least clarity possible – that should be alarming, too.”

— Michael Lewis

284. “Charlie Ledley – curiously uncertain Charlie Ledley – was odd in his belief that the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.”

— Michael Lewis

285. “In context the computer programmers appeared idle. They sat quietly, stared into their screens and sipped cappuccinos. And yet they were by far the most important people on board Hyperion.”

— Michael Lewis

286. “Danny and Vinny both thought the problem in this case was Eisman’s affinity for Bear Stearns. The most hated firm on Wall Street, famous mainly for its total indifference to the good opinion of its competitors, Eisman identified with the place!”

— Michael Lewis

287. “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

288. “When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos.”

— Michael Lewis

289. “Making profits on Wall Street is a bit like eating the stuffing from a turkey. Some higher authority must first put the stuffing into the turkey. The turkey was stuffed more generously in the 1980s than ever before.”

— Michael Lewis

290. “Lance was to computer programming what Joyce was to literature, possibly profound but also baffling.”

— Michael Lewis

291. “The more egregious the rating agencies’ mistakes, the bigger the opportunity for the Wall Street trading desks. In.”

— Michael Lewis

292. “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.”

— Michael Lewis

293. “In the red southern states the mayor sometimes would say,” Can you not mention that the government gave this?”

— Michael Lewis

294. “It’s the worldview in which if people tip in a restaurant to which they will never return it counts as a puzzle.”

— Michael Lewis

295. “The method of his execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man who played Mr. You’re Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life.”

— Michael Lewis

296. “Once handed the money, Paulson abandoned his promised strategy and instead essentially began giving away billions of dollars to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and a few others unnaturally selected for survival.”

— Michael Lewis

297. “It actually went pretty well, until they got onto the topic of marijuana. “So you got caught smoking weed your freshman and sophomore years,” said the Rockets interviewer. “What happened your junior year?” Williams just shook his head and said, “They stopped testing me. And if you’re not going to test me, I’m gonna smoke!”

— Michael Lewis

298. “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.”

— Michael Lewis

299. “It said something about the ability of the free marketplace to mold people’s behavior into a socially acceptable pattern. For this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive.”

— Michael Lewis

300. “In 1980 only 23 percent of state pension money had been invested in the stock market; by 2008 the number had risen to 60 percent.”

— Michael Lewis