The Germans made just about every bad investment you could have made in the last 10 years. They invested in Icelandic banks. They invested in Greek government bonds. They were heavy into Irish banks, big into Irish banks, and they bought U.S. subprime mortgage bonds.

Michael Lewis

Categorized in : Greek Government Mortgage

The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.

Michael Lewis

roots winning bible

People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.

Michael Lewis

tools mind people

As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.

Michael Lewis

optimism habit sometimes

We aren't natural statisticians. What we are is natural storytelling machines. And so what we do after we have the facts in hand is build a story to explain the facts.

Michael Lewis

stories hands facts

Just because you've been successful and just because you've disrupted an environment, doesn't mean you're a role model or that you actually have anything to teach anybody. There's an awful lot of luck and accident in the world, and maybe you were just on the receiving end of that.

Michael Lewis

role-models successful mean

People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.

Michael Lewis

uncertainty order people

A vast industry of stockbrokers, financial planners, and investment advisers skims a fortune for themselves off the top in exchange for passing their clients' money on to people who, as a whole, cannot possibly outperform the market.

Michael Lewis

investing clients people

When you're trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.

Michael Lewis

careers writing thinking

People really don't like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation.

Michael Lewis

luck successful people

Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

Michael Lewis

debt obligation luck

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

Michael Lewis

long believe people

A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term.

Michael Lewis

default credit confusing

All that was clear that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise.

Michael Lewis

overwhelmed smart people

Even as late as the summer of 2006, as home prices began to fall, it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them-to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch.

Michael Lewis

summer beautiful fall

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

Michael Lewis

zen-proverb knows knowledge

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.

Michael Lewis

dollars wall army

One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.

Michael Lewis

week differences two

A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

Michael Lewis

mind giving people

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.

Michael Lewis

derivatives wall world

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.

Michael Lewis

girl attitude teacher