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.
After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds--thei...
The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours
Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself.
The simple measure of sanity in housing prices, Zelman argued, was the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, in the United States, it ran around 3:1; by late 2004, it had risen nationall...
The relationship between the people and their money in California is such that you can pluck almost any city at random and enter a crisis. San Jose has the highest per capita income of any city in the...
In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.
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.
All good inventions come from something personal, she said. People create things because it’s personal.
One of the reasons Wall Street had cooked up this new industry called structured finance was that its old-fashioned business was every day less profitable. The profits in stockbroking, along with thos...
The difference between Strauss and Ranieri? says one trader still at Salomon. That’s easy. Strauss wouldn’t stoop to use the men’s room on the trading floor. He’d go upstairs. Lewie would piss on your...
But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.
If you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.
What do you mean there is no bathrobe in my suite??!!
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?
If you are going to start a regulatory regime from scratch, you’d design it to protect middle-and lower-middle-income people, because the opportunity for them to get ripped off was so high. Instead wh...
I remember his words, recalled Amnon. He said, 'There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can't have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys an...
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 ch...
People who think they know what they are talking about when they talk about baseball include the announcers and all of the sports press - no matter how much evidence you present them to the contrary t...
We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence.