Michael Lewis

mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they would have vanished long ago

This woman wasn't saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying that they were stupid. These people whose job it was to allocate capital apparently didn't even know how to manage their own.

ut then I read the news that a little-known New York hedge fund manager named John Paulson had made $20 billion or so for his investors and nearly $4 billion for himself. This was more money than anyone had ever made so quickly on Wall Street. Moreover, he had done it by betting against the very subprime mortgage bonds now sinking Citigroup and every other big Wall Street investment bank

Eisman's parents, old-fashioned value investors at heart, had always told him that the best way to learn about Wall Street was to work as an equity analyst. He started in equity analysis, working for the people who shaped public opinion about public companies

The subprime mortgage machine roared on. The loans that were being made to actual human beings only grew crappier, but, bizarrely, the price of insuring them--the price of buying credit default swaps--fell.

On our walk I asked him how much it would take for him to sell FTX and go do something other than make money. He thought the question over. “One hundred and fifty billion dollars,” he finally said

When you asked Sam to describe a person’s appearance—­even a person he’d slept with—­he’d say, “I don’t really know how to answer that. I’m not good at judging how people look.”

Chess he’d have liked better if robot voices wired into the board hollered rule changes at random intervals. Knights are now rooks! All bishops must leave the board! Pawns can now fly! Or almost anything—­so long as the new rule forced all players to scrap whatever strategy they’d been pursuing and improvise another, better one. The games Sam loved allowed for only partial knowledge of any situation. Trading crypto was like that.

tells you something about Magic culture that tournament rules eventually included standards of personal hygiene, after players began to weaponize their body odor.

Approximately zero of MIT’s physics majors became physicists anymore. Most went to work for Google, or for high-­frequency trading firms. Jump Trading, Tower Research Capital, Hudson River Trading, Susquehanna International Group, Wolverine Trading, Jane Street Capital: all these Wall Street companies Sam had never heard of came to the job fair that year inside the MIT gym. And he became just a little curious about them.