Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]
BAFU. Billions and All Fucked Up.
And so it went in football. The game attracted the very people most likely to get in trouble outside
After the markets closed Vinny would get into his Cadillac and drive out to his big house in Long Island. Now there is the guy called Vladimir who gets into his jet and flies to his estate in Aspen fo...
The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.
Worth. A baseball team, of all things, was at the center of a story about the possibilities—and the limits—of reason in human affairs. Baseball—of all things—was an example of how an unscientific cult...
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...
Why were they prepaying so fast? Vinny asked himself. It made no sense to me. Then I saw that the reason the prepayments were so high is that they were involuntary.
These folks don’t know what they’re talking about. If losses go to ten percent there will be, like, a million homeless people. (Losses in the pools Hubler’s group had bet on would eventually reach 40...
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.
The trouble was that clarity and simplicity were more important in computer language than in human language.
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. —Sun-tzu
The only thing capitalism cannot survive is stability. Stability—true stability—is an absence of progress, and a dearth of new wealth.
The desire to avoid loss ran deep, and expressed itself most clearly when the gamble came with the possibility of both loss and gain. That is, when it was like most gambles in life. To get most people...
Once very smart people are paid huge sums of money to exploit the flaws in the financial system, they have the spectacularly destructive incentive to screw the system up further, or to remain silent a...
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.
Inside a dark pool, no one but the broker who ran it had any idea what was happening.
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...
Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.
Every form of strength is also a weakness. Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them.