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,...
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 y...
The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all of your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest sp...
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 f...
The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how cor...
The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction.
The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value.
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
She dropped the matter, and his birthday remained May 28. Armed with the Social Security card, the birth certificate, and the letter from Principal Simpson of the Briarcrest Christian School, they dro...
Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system…Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said. The prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its o...
Los sujetos no elegían entre cosas. Elegían entre descripciones de cosas.
Knowledge is literally prediction, said Morey. Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally everything you do you’re trying to predict the right thing. Most peop...
I’d thought it strange, after the financial crisis, in which Goldman had played such an important role, that the only Goldman Sachs employee who had been charged with any sort of crime was the employe...
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 poi...
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.
It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.
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 a...
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.
I have this theory, says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache Securities. Wall Street makes its best producers intomanagers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made amanager...
He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.