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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.

-Michael Lewis

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Every Form Of Strength

Michael Lewis

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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.

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The Incentive For The Outsider Is To Attack The System Right Up To The Moment He Is Co-opted By It. The Incentive For The Insider -and This Took Some Getting Used To- Is To Allow Yourself To Be Attacked, And Then Co-opt Your Most Ferocious Attackers, And Their Best Ideas. The Effect On The System As A Whole Is To Make It More Stable, Because Everyone Winds Up Working On Its Behalf.

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.

I Don't Think There Is A National Pasttime. Watching Tv Is A National Pasttime. Really. If There Is A National Pasttime, It Is Watching Tv.

Why Isn't Someone Smarter Than Us Doing This?

Why Pay $20 Million To Harrison Ford? I Dont Even Understand That. They Think They Have To Do It... If Someone Puts A Price On Himself, That Suggests He Is Irreplaceable, Then He Better Find Somewhere Else To Work.

There's No Point In Arguing With Partisan Supporters. Their Views Are Their Identity. Nothing You Can Tell The Most Phlegmatic Follower.

If You Have A Patient In A Doctor's Office Who's Just Been Told They Have Terminal Cancer But There's This Operation They Could Perform Right Now That Might Save Their Lives. ... They Have A 90 Percent Chance Of Surviving The Operation — If You Tell Them That, They Respond One Way. If You Tell Them ... That They Have A 10 Percent Chance Of Being Killed By The Operation, They Are About Three Times Less Likely To Have The Operation.

My Client Loved Risk. Risk, I Had Learned, Was A Commodity In Itself. Risk Could Be Canned And Sold Like Tomatoes.

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.

Book Tours Are Almost Designed To Beat Out Of An Author Any Affection He Has For His Book.

Those Who Know Don't Tell And Those Who Tell Don't Know.

The Arrangement Bore The Same Relation To Actual Finance As Fantasy Football Bears To The Nfl.

In Bakersfield, California, A Mexican Strawberry Picker With An Income Of $14,000 And No English Was Lent Every Penny He Needed To Buy A House For $724,000.

A Banking System Is An Act Of Faith: It Survives Only For As Long As People Believe It Will.

People In Both Fields Operate With Beliefs And Biases. To The Extent You Can Eliminate Both And Replace Them With Data, You Gain A Clear Advantage.

The Idea That It's Smart To Allow Wall Street Firms, With This "too Big To Fail" Imprimatur, To Become Hedge Funds Again - It's Unconscionable. You're Essentially Saying We're Going To Take Some Elites In Our Society And Let Them Roll The Bones In The Marketplace, And If It Works Out They Get Rich, And If It Doesn't Work Out The Taxpayer Comes In Again. That Seems Absolutely Crazy To Me. That Seems To Be Where They're Headed. I Mean, Maybe They're Not And I'm Wrong. Maybe They'll Do Sensible Things. It's Hard To Know! There Doesn't Seem To Be A Plan.

If You’ve Got A Dozen Pitchers, You Need To Speak 12 Different Languages.

As Idiotic As Optimism Can Sometimes Seem, It Has A Weird Habit Of Paying Off.

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.

It Is The Nature Of Being The General Manager Of A Baseball Team That You Have To Remain On Familiar Terms With People You Are Continually Trying To Screw.

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 Inadequate Tool For Learning What You Needed To Know To Evaluate Baseball Players And Baseball Games. Think About It. One Absolutely Cannot Tell, By Watching, The Difference Between A .300 Hitter And A .275 Hitter. The Difference Is One Hit Every Two Weeks. The Difference Between A Good Hitter And An Average Hitter Is Simply Not Visible-it Is A Matter Of Record

Time And Space Are Absolute. Diseases Are Evil Spirits That Inhabit The Body. Parallel Lines Never Meet. The Earth Is The Center Of The Universe. Children Are Miniature Adults. At One Time In History Each Of These Beliefs Was Generally Held To Be True. Each, However, Gave Way To Different Ideas And Even Different World Views.

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.

What Happens When We Acknowledge The Sovereignty And Power Of God Without Trusting In His Goodness And Faithfulness? A Pitcher Who Saw God's Power Behind His Extremely Unlikely Rise To The Big Leagues Wondered If, At Any Difficulty He Encountered There, God Might Be Taking His Ability Away.

The Reason The Greeks Don't Pay Taxes Is They Don't Trust Where Their Taxes Are Going, Because They Know These Other Greeks Are Taking Money From The State For Doing Nothing. So It's - It's An Essentially Corrupt Society.

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.

My Characters Are Actually Usually Pretty Smart And Admirable.

It's Such A Pain In The Ass To Write A Book, I Can't Imagine Writing One If I'm Not Interested In The Subject.

In Japan, Mothers Insist On Achievement And Accomplishment As A Sign Of Love And Respect. Thus To Fail Places Children In A Highly Shamed Situation.

People Were Paid Lots Of Money To Make Stupid Decisions, People In Big Banks, And When People Are Paid To Be Stupid They'll Be Stupid. The Question Was, Did They Know They Were Being Stupid Or Were They Just Stupid? I Think You Need To Take It On A Case By Case Basis. There Was Some Sinister Activity, But I Think By And By It Was People Being Incentivised To Do The Wrong Thing.

When You're Trying To Create A Career As A Writer, A Little Delusional Thinking Goes A Long Way.

All Of A Sudden The Market Is All About Algos And Routers.

I Didn't Think One Day Something Would Happen That Would Bring Me Back To Wall Street To Write What Is Essentially A Sequel.

The Red Sox Are A Curious Thing Because So Much Here Is Media Driven. You Can't Go Fire Half Your Scouts Here Because They Are All Friends With The Local Reporters. Your Life Is Going To Hell In The Papers.

Baseball Has So Much History And Tradition. You Can Respect It, Or You Can Exploit It For Profit, But It's Still Being Made All Over The Place, All The Time.

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.

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.

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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, 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.

When Something Happens People Didn't Predict, They Find Ways To Explain It As If It Were Predictable.

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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.

Each Firm Held Its Rope; One By One, They Realized That No Matter How Strongly They Pulled, The Balloon Would Eventually Lift Them Off Their Feet.

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Baseball Is This Intense Subculture That Actually Doesn't Speak Very Much For The Larger Culture.

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What's Fun Is Watching Actors Of That Calibre Bring Them To Life. It's Incredible. Christian Bale Spent A Day With The Character He Plays And After My Year Of Being With Him I Couldn't Have Generated The Same View Of Him. They Have A Different Way Of Looking At People, It's Fascinating To Watch.

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My Judgement Is Not Good When I Am On A Book Tour. I Am Not Thinking About It That Much. What Happens Is I Will Go Back Home. I Have A 4-year-old And A 1-year-old And A Wife Who Is Now Taking Care Of Them Who Is Wondering Where Her Husband Is.

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Managers Tend To Pick A Strategy That Is The Least Likely To Fail, Rather Then To Pick A Strategy That Is Most Efficient," Said Palmer. " The Pain Of Looking Bad Is Worse Than The Gain Of Making The Best Move.

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Donald Trump Got Almost 3 Million Fewer Votes Than Hillary Clinton! He Happened To Get More In Some Of The Right Places. It Was Just Like One Of Those Things Where A Stock Going Up And People Impose A False Sense Of Order On It. It's Really More Intellectually Honestly Viewed As A Disorderly Process.

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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.

I Was Really Interested In A Pretty Simple Thing: What Happens When Someone Tries To Introduce Moral Considerations Into Wall Street, What Happens When Someone Wants To Actually Demand Of Himself And Those Who Work With Him That What They Do Is Not Just Profitable But Good And Useful.

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Jacks Are Home Runs. So Are Dongs, Bombs, And Big Flies. Baseball People Express Their Fondness For A Thing By Thinking Up Lots Of Different Ways To Say It.

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.

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.

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.

People In The Voting Booth Are Not Purely Rational Creatures Any More Than They're Purely Rational Creatures Outside The Voting Booth.

At Sgi Board Meetings... Jim Clark's Face Would Get Red And He'd Start Shouting That An Investor And Board Member Had Cheated Him And His Engineers.

Everywhere You Turn You See Americans Sacrifice Their Long-term Interests For A Short-term Reward.

He Was Blessed With An Unconventional Mind, Which Overcame His Conventional Middle-class Upbringing.

We Have The Google Family Calendar. Before A Week Starts, My Wife And I Sit Down To Decide Who's Driving Who To School Or When Can We Go Out On A Date.

Wall Street Is Not Being Made A Scapegoat For This Crisis: They Really Did This.

There Are Several Insights At The Heart Of The A’s System That I Think Are Wonderful For Baseball. One, That It’s A Team Game. That No One Player Is Going To Make That Much Of A Difference To Your Team, So For God’s Sake Don’t Go Blow A Quarter Of Your Budget On One Guy.

A Thought Crossed His Mind: How Do You Make Poor People Feel Wealthy When Wages Are Stagnant? You Give Them Cheap Loans.

The Fuses Had Been Lit And Could Not Be Extinguished. All That Remained Was To Observe The Speed Of The Spark, And The Size Of The Explosions.

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.

You Want The Book To Be Special, And They Are Not Always Going To Be Special, But At Least You Want That To Be The Ambition. So The Only Way That Happens Is If You Are Not Pressing To Write A Book.

The Moulin Rouge Is, Like The West Village And The Nasdaq, One Of Those Places That People Who Don't Like To Take Risks Come To For The Thrill Of Being On The Spot Where Risks Once Were Taken.

The Sheer Quantity Of Brain Power That Hurled Itself Voluntarily And Quixotically Into The Search For New Baseball Knowledge Was Either Exhilarating Or Depressing, Depending On How You Felt About Baseball. The Same Intellectual Resources Might Have Cured The Common Cold, Or Put A Man On Pluto.

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 I Don't Think Its Sense Of Purpose Has Changed At All.

He Was Ignorant, But A Lot Of People Mistook Ignorance For Stupidity, And Knowingness For Intelligence.

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 Always Find With My Stories That The Way They Start Is That I Just Get So Interested In A Person That I'm Compelled To Go Back To Them Over And Over Until I Learn More And More About Them, Without Even Quite Thinking It's Material For A Book.

If You Had To Point To One Thing That Made It Less Likely That The Red Sox Would Win The World Series, I Would Say It Was Those People That Go To Fenway Park To Watch The Games. And Then The Media Around It.

The Only Thing History Teaches Us, A Wise Man Once Said, Is That History Doesn’t Teach Us Anything.

That Was How A Salomon Bond Trader Thought: He Forgot Whatever It Was That He Wanted To Do For A Minute And Put His Finger On The Pulse Of The Market. If The Market Felt Fidgety, If People Were Scared Or Desperate, He Herded Them Like Sheep Into A Corner, Then Made Them Pay For Their Uncertainty. He Sat On The Market Until It Puked Gold Coins. Then He Worried About What He Wanted To Do.

If You're The Kind Of Kid Who Thinks That All That's Important In Life Is Making Money, Wall Street Is Probably Still The Place To Go, Especially Now That Trump's Elected.

When An American Declares Bankruptcy, When He Hits Bottom, He Can Reinvent Himself. There's A Story He Can Tell. We Tolerate Reinvention. We Encourage Reinvention. That's What This Country Has That Europe Does Not. It's Not Just A Crisis; It's An Opportunity.

You Could Argue The Banks Are Much Better Capitalised Than They Were Going Into The Crisis, And Everyone's In A Much More Vigilant State Because They Still Remember The Crisis.

The Longer-term The Option, The Sillier The Results Generated By The Black-scholes Option Pricing Model, And The Greater The Opportunity For People Who Didn't Use It.

Hollywood Would Much Prefer The Author Be Dead, So That They Can Buy The Book And Do What They Want To Do With It.

The Incentives Are Still Rotten, And People Are Still Paid To Do Things They Shouldn't Be Doing. The Reforms Did Not Really Address The Incentives, The System Is Still Dysfunctional And There Are Still Behavioural Issues That Need To Be Addressed.

The World Clings To Its Old Mental Picture Of The Stock Market Because It’s Comforting; Because It’s So Hard To Draw A Picture Of What Has Replaced It; And Because The Few People Able To Draw It For You Have No Interest In Doing So.

The Men On The Trading Floor May Not Have Been To School, But They Have Ph.d.’s In Man’s Ignorance.

I Was Gonna Put Him On The Bus...i Got Tired Of Him Talking, It Was Time For Him To Go Home.

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.

It Is Far Better To Keep The Enemy Close, By Bribing Him With Stock Options, Than To Have Him Out In The Wild, Foraging.

I'd Say Part Of The Appeal Of Trump Is That He's Presenting Himself As A Totally Certain, Infallible Person.

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.

The Sentimentality Of Baseball Is Very Deeply Rooted In The American Baseball Fan. It Is The One Sport That Is Transmitted From Fathers To Sons.

I Confess Some Part Of Me Thought, If Only I'd Stuck Around, This Is The Sort Of Catastrophe I Might Have Created.

There Has Been This - And It's Reflected In The Broadcasts - This Moronic Use Of Statistics. Which Has Suggested To Everyone Who Is Intelligent The Use Of Statistics Is Moronic.

Like Adam, Formed From Clay, Children Are Formed From The Biological Material Of Which They Are Made Or By The Hands Of Their Parents.

There's Something Bad In Everything Good And Something Good In Everything Bad.

Warren Buffett Is Fond Of Saying That Any Player Unaware Of The Fool In The Market Probably Is The Fool In The Market.

That's What Happens When You're Thirty-seven Years Old: You Do The Things You Always Did But The Result Is Somehow Different.

Everything, In Retrospect, Is Obvious. But If Everything Were Obvious, Authors Of Histories Of Financial Folly Would Be Rich . . .

When The Last History Of High-frequency Trading Is Written, Hunsader, Like Joe Saluzzi And Sal Arnuk Of Themis Trading, Deserves A Prominent Place In It.

Thirdly-but Not Lastly-there Was The Bias Toward What People Saw With Their Own Eyes, Or Thought They Had Seen. The Human Mind Played Tricks On Itself When It Relied Exclusively On What It Saw. There Was A Lot You Couldn't See When You Watched A Game

The Institutions At The Centre Of Capitalism Are Bigger Than They've Ever Been, The Pay Is Much Greater, The Ability Of Society To Get Its Arms Around It Is Much Less. The Political Clout Of The Financial Class Is Unbelievable. I'd Say The Story Is Darker Than When I Was There. When I Was There It Felt Like A Comedy - And Now It Feels More Like A Tragedy.

The United States Stock Market, The Most Iconic Market In Global Capitalism, Is Rigged.

People Who Think They Know What They Are Talking About When They Talk About Baseball Include The Announcers And All Of The Sports Press - No Matter How Much Evidence You Present Them To The Contrary They Will Continue To Think That What They Think Is Right.

People Dislike Uncertainty So Much That They Will Impose An Order On It Even When It Doesn't Exist.

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.

I'd Stumbled Into A Job At Salomon Brothers In 1985, And Stumbled Out, Richer, In 1988, And Even Though I Wrote A Book About The Experience, The Whole Thing Still Strikes Me Me As Totally Preposterous-which Is One Reason The Money Was So Easy To Walk Away From.

Here Was A Strange But True Fact: The Closer You Were To The Market, The Harder It Was To Perceive Its Folly.

I Think That Fans Are Always Looking For Someone To Blame. Wouldn't It Be Nice If They Looked In The Mirror?

I Procrastinate To A Point Where I'm Filled With Self-loathing And Then I Start Writing. It's Usually A State Of Self-loathing That Gets Me Going.

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