37 quotes
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.
The Big Short (2010)
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.
The Big Short (2010)
These guys lied to infinity. What I learned from that experience was that Wall Street didn't give a shit what it sold.
The Big Short (2010)
Why isn't someone smarter than us doing this?
The Big Short (2010)
A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.
The Big Short (2010)
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.
The Big Short (2010)
Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly.
The Big Short (2010)
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.
The Big Short (2010)
He now suspected that every human being who knew how high-frequency traders made money was making too much money doing it to stop and explain what was going on.
Flash Boys (2014)
"Liquidity" was one of those words Wall Street people threw around when they wanted the conversation to end, and for brains to go dead, and for all questioning to cease.
Flash Boys (2014)
I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.
The Big Short (2010)
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 to another.
Flash Boys (2014)
The role had been spawned by the widespread belief that traders didn’t know how to talk to computer geeks and that computer geeks did not respond rationally to big, hairy traders hollering at them.
Flash Boys (2014)
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 Big Short (2010)
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.
The Big Short (2010)
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.
The Big Short (2010)
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.
Flash Boys (2014)
The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.
Flash Boys (2014)
The more money to be made gaming the financial markets, the more people would decide they were put on earth to game the financial markets – and create romantic narratives to explain to themselves why a life spent gaming the financial markets is a purposeful life.
Flash Boys (2014)
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 Big Short (2010)