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
Don't worry where I am. I'll tell you 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
The risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don’t. Which brought us to the fifth risk.
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.
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 someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of. That
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...
Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.
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 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 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 nice thing about things that are urgent, he liked to say, is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.
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
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...
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 best decisions he has made in his life, he said, were completely unexpected, the ones that cut against convention. Then he went even further. He said that every decision he has forced himself to m...
That was somewhere near the middle of a modern gold rush. Never before have so many unskilled twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time as we did this decade in New York and London.