Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

When you had $22.5 billion, people really, really wanted to be your friend. They’d forgive you anything.

“Mass delusions are a property of the world, as it turns out,”

It wasn’t that he thrived under pressure; it was that he didn’t feel it. He

Singer was making it too difficult for ordinary affluent people to live a moral life.

The markets were engaged in a kind of information deforestation—an attempt to reduce to zero the amount of time it took for any piece of information to be registered in the prices of financial assets.

inherently probabilistic situations would be interpreted, after the fact, as having been black-and-white, or good and bad, or right and wrong.

The whole thing was odd: these people joined together by their fear of trust erected a parallel financial system that required more trust from its users than did the traditional financial system.

It estimated that 80 percent or more of the volume on the second- and third-tier exchanges, and 30 percent of the volume on the top few exchanges, was fake.