Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis
Michael Monroe Lewisis an American non-fiction author and financial journalist. His bestselling books include Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, Panic, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, and Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. He has also been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009. His most recent book, Flash Boys, which looked at the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth15 October 1960
CityNew Orleans, LA
CountryUnited States of America
A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.
The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.
Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.
Commitment, by its nature, frees us from ourselves and, while it stands us in opposition to some, it joins us with others similarly committed. Commitment moves us from the mirror trap of the self absorbed with the self to the freedom of a community of shared values.
He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.
He's a machine for competitive balance, ... Yes, the money is in New York. Yes, the money is in his hands. But he squanders money. Thank God for it.
Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.
The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.
The Irish turned in on themselves and bid up their own land prices in the most extraordinary ways. The Irish people stepped in and guaranteed the banks, and committed to repay sums they can't afford to repay, and essentially committed themselves to generations of suffering.
Girls tend to attribute their failures to factors such as lack of ability, while boys tend to attribute failure to specific factors, including teachers' attitudes. Moreover, girls avoid situations in which failure is likely, whereas boys approach such situations as a challenge, indicating that failure differentially affects self-esteem.
One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.
What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions--if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong.
Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.
Looking into it a bit, Jamie found that the model used by Wall Street to price LEAPs, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, made some strange assumptions.