The same system that once gave us subprime mortgage collateralized debt obligations no investor could possibly truly understand now gave us stock market trades that occurred at fractions of a penny at...
The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as arduous is as early as fifty-five for men and fifty for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more th...
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.
The quarterback of the Washington Redskins, Joe Theismann, turns and hands the ball to running back John Riggins. He watches Riggins run two steps forward, turn, and flip the ball back to him. It’s wh...
The market might have learned a simple lesson: Don’t make loans to people who can’t repay them. Instead it learned a complicated one: You can keep on making these loans, just don’t keep them on your b...
The less transparent the market and the more complicated the securities, the more money the trading desks at big Wall Street firms can make from the argument. The constant argument over the value of t...
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
Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don’t know, said
I’m now convinced that the worst thing a man can do with a telephone without breaking the law is to call someone he doesn’t know and try to sell that person something he doesn’t want.
It’s what you fail to imagine that kills you.
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...
He wondered, often, what it would look like if and when the shit in question hit the fan: The stock market at bottom was rigged. The icon of global capitalism was a fraud. How would enterprising polit...
He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.
He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.
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.
Eisman was quick to see narratives, he explained the world in stories, and this was one of the stories he used to explain himself. The
Dont worry about where i am , i'll let you know when i get there .
By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface. It
Rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine
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.