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Portrait of Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis

(1960) Journalist

398 quotes in 1087 categories

A boardroom full of men makes a crucial decision based on gut feeling. He describes how personal intensity can drive a marriage to the edge, and he compares banking to a belief that only lasts while people keep trusting it. The quotes mix business, romance, and sport in vivid snapshots.

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Michael Lewis is a journalist, best known for The big short: inside the doomsday machine.

Quick Facts About Michael Lewis

Born: October 15, 1960
Profession: Journalist
Notable works: The big short: inside the doomsday machine

About Michael Lewis

Since 2009 he has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he writes mainly about business, finance and economics. His nonfiction books often explore financial crises and how people make financial decisions.

Quotes by Michael Lewis

“The batter’s box was a cage designed to crush his spirit.”

Cage

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“Investment bankers make money for a living.”

Bankers

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Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.

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“Pascal, Faith is God made sensible to the heart, then”

Faith

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“The smart person accepts. The idiot insists.”

Idiot

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Why isn't someone smarter than us doing this?

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“train were harder than usual to ignore. They were”

Fitness

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“What do you mean there is no bathrobe in my suite??!!”

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“All of a sudden the market is all about algos and routers. It’s hard to figure this stuff out.”

Investing

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I think that fans are always looking for someone to blame. Wouldn't it be nice if they looked in the mirror?

Being nice

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Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the…

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“We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence.”

Artificial intelligence

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Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly.

Facts

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My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.

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“those with the least training (graduate students) were just as accurate as the fully trained ones (paid pros)”

Fitness

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In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt.

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The Red Sox are a curious thing because so much here is media driven. You can't go fire half your scouts here…

Baseball

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The longer-term the option, the sillier the results generated by the Black-Scholes option pricing model, and the greater the opportunity for people…

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“Had Volcker never pushed through his radical change in policy, the world would be many bond traders and one memoir the poorer.”

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The incentives are still rotten, and people are still paid to do things they shouldn't be doing. The reforms did not really…

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“If perception had the power to overwhelm reality in such a simple case, how much power might it have in a more…

Perception

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“They would learn to evaluate a decision not by its outcomes--whether it turned out to be right or wrong--but by the process…

Decision making

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A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on…

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You can anchor the mind into answering a question a certain way by giving them a totally unrelated piece of information dropped…

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“After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely…

Bias

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“Before Volcker’s speech, bonds had been conservative investments, into which investors put their savings when they didn’t fancy a gamble in the…

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“The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago. What goes on inside…

Black boxes

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“Long Beach Savings was the first existing bank to adopt what was called the “originate and sell” model. This proved such a…

Customer

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“The initial promise of computer technology was to remove the intermediary from the financial market, or at least reduce the amount he…

Computer technology

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“At other places management says, ‘Well, gee, fellas, do we really want to bet the ranch on this deal?’ Lewie was not…

Management

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“If you ever care to see how all the world’s most awful jokes spread, spend a day on a bond trading desk.…

Jokes

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Girls tend to attribute their failures to factors such as lack of ability, while boys tend to attribute failure to specific factors,…

Ability

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“The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran major league baseball teams…

Bad luck

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“Imagine, for instance, that someone passed a rule, in the U.S. stock market as it is currently configured, that required every stock…

Customer

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“If you are a self-possessed man with a healthy sense of detachment from your bank account and someone writes you a cheque…

Bank account

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People really don't like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel…

Accidents

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“Back in July 2003, he’d written them a long essay on the causes and consequences of what he took to be a…

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“As they worked through the order types, they created a taxonomy of predatory behavior in the stock market. Broadly speaking, it appeared…

Arbitrage

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“Where to find the borrowers with high FICO scores? Here the Wall Street bond trading desks exploited another blind spot in the…

Point of view

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“If the incarceration experience doesn't break your spirit, it changes you in a way that you lose many fears. You begin to…

Fear

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Michael Lewis by topic

Customer (72) Investing (56) Wall street (51) People (35) Baseball (30) Money (29) Wall St (25) Thinking (17) Life (16) Wall (13) Streets (13) Recession (13) Psychology (12) Football (11) Books (10)