37 quotes
Thus the only Goldman Sachs employee arrested by the FBI in the aftermath of a financial crisis Goldman had done so much to fuel was the employee Goldman asked the FBI to arrest.
Flash Boys (2014)
Incredibly, at this critical juncture in financial history, after which so much changed so quickly, the only constraint in the subprime mortgage market was a shortage of people willing to bet against it.
The Big Short (2010)
Ever since grade school, when his father had shown him the stock tables at the back of the newspaper and told him that the stock market was a crooked place and never to be trusted, let alone invested in, the subject had fascinated him.
The Big Short (2010)
People who had lived without government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state that had not yet collapsed.
The Fifth Risk (2018)
the more he studied Buffet, the less he thought he could be copied; indeed, the lesson of Buffet was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.
The Big Short (2010)
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.
The Big Short (2010)
The entire history of Wall Street was the story of scandals, it now seemed to him, linked together tail to trunk like circus elephants. Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice.
Flash Boys (2014)
"You see, I’m the event. I am the news"
Flash Boys (2014)
They traded in the market the way card counters in a casino played blackjack: They played only when they had an edge. That’s why they were able to trade for five years without losing money on a single day.
Flash Boys (2014)
The SEC staffer argued that it was unfair that high-frequency traders couldn’t post phony bids and offers on the exchanges to extract information from actual investors without running the risk of having to stand by them.
Flash Boys (2014)
He walked around the Las Vegas casino incredulous at the spectacle before him: seven thousand people, all of whom seem delighted with the world as they found it. A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems, and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen. How could this be?
The Big Short (2010)
The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became
Flash Boys (2014)
Why, between the dark pools and the public exchanges, were there nearly sixty different places, most of them in New Jersey, where you could buy any listed stock? Why did the public exchanges fiddle with their own pricing so often—and why did you get paid by one exchange to do exactly the same thing for which another exchange might charge you?
Flash Boys (2014)
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.
The Big Short (2010)
Reg NMS was intended to create equality of opportunity in the U.S. stock market. Instead it institutionalized a more pernicious inequality. A small class of insiders with the resources to create speed were now allowed to preview the market and trade on what they had seen.
Flash Boys (2014)
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.
The Big Short (2010)
The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. What had once been the world’s most public, most democratic, financial market had become, in spirit, something like a private viewing of a stolen work of art.
Flash Boys (2014)