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
I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.
Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this.
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.
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.
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.
The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.
The model used by Wall Street to price trillions of dollar's worth of derivatives thought of the financial world as an orderly, continuous process. But the world was not continuous; it changed discontinuously, and often by accident.
I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.
The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less.
Bruce and I both put $50 in a bank account. That's how we started the company.
The A's are held to the standard of the Yankees in a funny kind of way. That if they don't win the World Series it is regarded as a failure.
What we've seen since the beginning of January is that the futures market is increasing the possibility of an oil price spike before the end of the year.
But there was no player on whom his mind naturally fixed. The only person in the organization whose riddance would make him happier was his manager, Art Howe. It wasn't long before he had a novel idea: trade Art.
One reason we've seen a decline in the past few years is that going to the movies isn't as special as it used to be. People have big screens and good sound at home. Why would they leave if you don't offer more than that?