Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.
The first day after the merger, Brad got a call from a worried female employee, who whispered, There is a guy in here with suspenders walking around with a baseball bat in his hands, taking swings. Th...
Isocrates: Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as...
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...
Whenever Wall Street people tried to argue—as they often did—that the subprime lending problem was caused by the mendacity and financial irresponsibility of ordinary Americans, he’d
When something becomes obvious to you, he said, you immediately think surely someone else is doing this.
When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.
The trick was not simply to write the code that turned information into pictures but to find the best pictures to draw—shapes and colors that led the mind to meaning.
The politicians in Ireland speak Gaelic the way the Real Housewives of Orange County speak French.
The final two words of his challenge, no tears, meant that the loser was expected to suffer a great deal of pain, but wasn’t entitled to whine, bitch or moan about it. He’d just have to hunker down an...
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...
Textbooks in economics, which explain the economic purpose of money (a unit of account, a store of value, and a means of exchange), usually neglect to mention the chief role of money in America: a sou...
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...
No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo.
Amos was not merely an optimist. He himself to be an optimist because he had decided pessimism was stupid. When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. On...
A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.
Market leader in interest rate swaps. There was a natural role for a blue-chip corporation with the highest credit rating to stand in the middle of swaps and long-term options and the other risk-spawn...
Good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.
When banking stops, credit stops, and when credit stops, trade stops, and when trade stops—well, the city of Chicago had only eight days of chlorine on hand for its water supply. Hospitals ran out of...
WHEN HE WAS a young man Billy Beane could beat anyone at anything.