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Wall street Quotes by Michael Lewis

51 Wall street quotes by Michael Lewis

All Wall street quotes Michael Lewis’s page

Michael Lewis notes that economic theory often does little in real‑world finance. He describes how banks began to ‘originate and sell’ loans, turning them into fast‑moving securities. He points out that the mortgage bond market dragged everyday debt into Wall Street’s risky playground.

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“But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.”

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“Ronan, for his part, couldn’t quite believe how ordinary the people on Wall Street were. “It’s a whole industry of bullshit,” he…

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“This completed the curious reversal in roles that occurred in the early 1980s, when thrifts became traders and traders thrifts.”

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“These Ginnie Maes suck. They get longer [in maturity] when rates go up, and shorter when rates go down, and nobody wants…

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I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or…

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“On Wall Street, the lawyers play the same role as medics in war: They come in after the shooting is over to…

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“What Gutfreund said has become a legend at Salomon Brothers and a visceral part of its corporate identity. He said: “One hand,…

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“The creation of the mortgage bond market, a decade earlier, had extended Wall Street into a place it had never before been:…

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“They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not…

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Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity…

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In Wall Street now, you have to hide what you're doing. It's more fun when you don't have to do that. But…

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If you're the kind of kid who thinks that all that's important in life is making money, Wall Street is probably still…

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The model used by Wall Street to price trillions of dollar's worth of derivatives thought of the financial world as an orderly,…

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“The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know)…

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

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“The gist of Laszlo’s pitch for the equity department was this question: When you turn on your television at six-thirty and Dan…

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The idea that it's smart to allow Wall Street firms, with this "too big to fail" imprimatur, to become hedge funds again…

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“Because the lenders sold many—though not all—of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry…

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“Take a typical three-hundred-million-dollar CMO. It would be divided into three tranches, or slices of a hundred million dollars each. Investors in…

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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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“A big Wall Street bank’s biggest advantage was its access to vast amounts of cheap risk capital and, with that, its ability…

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“The triple-A tranches all traded at one price, the triple-B tranches all traded at another, even though there were important differences from…

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“For that purpose, partly as the result of Ranieri’s persistent lobbying, two new facilities had sprung up in the federal government alongside…

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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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“I have this theory," says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache Securities. "Wall Street makes its best producers into managers.…

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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…

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“Many thrifts layered a billion dollars of brand-new loans on top of their existing, disastrous hundred million dollars of old loss-making loans,…

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“There was more than one way to think about Mike Burry’s purchase of a billion dollars in credit default swaps. The first…

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“The new structure of the U.S. stock market had removed the big Wall Street banks from their historic, lucrative role as intermediary.…

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“On its surface, the booming market in side bets on subprime mortgage bonds seemed to be the financial equivalent of fantasy football:…

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I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a…

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Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this.

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Looking into it a bit, Jamie found that the model used by Wall Street to price LEAPs, the Black-Scholes option pricing model,…

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“Both had trouble generating conviction of their own but no trouble at all reacting to what they viewed as the false conviction…

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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…

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I was really interested in a pretty simple thing: what happens when someone tries to introduce moral considerations into Wall Street, what…

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“For though there was no chance of persuading a pension fund manager looking to make a longer-term loan to buy a Freddie…

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“Corporate finance, which services the corporations and governments that borrow money, and that are known as “clients,” is, by comparison, a refined…

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“By the middle of 2011, roughly 30 percent of all stock market trades occurred off the public exchanges, most of them in…

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More by Michael Lewis

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There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on…

“The author refers to a player's affected nonchalance and comments he is, "too young to realize you are what you pretend to be.”

A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.

Some coaches believed they could judge a player's performance simply by watching it. In this they were deeply mistaken. The naked eye was an…

“No longer were the prices of ordinary mortgage bonds allowed to roam inefficiently, for they were now linked to the CMO market, in much…

“The difference between Strauss and Ranieri?” says one trader still at Salomon. “That’s easy. Strauss wouldn’t stoop to use the men’s room on the…

“The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost…

“It's not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria - to believe that most of what's in the financial news is wrong, to believe…

“Dont worry about where i am , i'll let you know when i get there .”

“Someone out there was using the fact that stock market orders arrived at different times at different exchanges to front-run orders from one market…