Models.Behaving.Badly Quotes

“Cruelty links all three primitives [pleasure, pain, and desire]: Spinoza defines it as the desire to inflict pain on someone we love or pity. Financial speaking, cruelty is analogous to a convertible bond whose debt and equity depend on three economic underliers: the stock price, the level of interest rates, and the credit worthiness of the company's debt.”
― Emanuel Derman, Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life

“Treasury Bills The simplest, safest way to generate future cash from current cash is to buy a short-term, three-month Treasury bill. The purchase price you pay is loaned to the government, which in return promises to pay you a guaranteed rate of interest for three months and then return your principal. Because it is very unlikely that the U.S. Treasury will not be around to repay you three months later, the investment is close to riskless and therefore pays a low rate of interest. Its return serves as a benchmark for riskier securities, which must promise to pay more.”
― Emanuel Derman, Models.Behaving.Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life

“I don’t judge him now. Like most of us, he wasn’t what he thought he was. But thankfully, for most of us, comprehension of the disparity between who we think we are and who we truly are comes gradually and with age. We are lucky to avoid a sudden tear in our self-image and suffer more easily its slow degradation. For Leftwich the apparent union between personality and character ruptured like the fuselage of the early De Havilland Comet, in an instant, in midair, unable to withstand the mismatch between external and internal pressure. How do you ever forgive yourself for a betrayal like that? But we have all committed acts that surprise us and are hard to forgive. You can count yourself lucky if your model of yourself survives its collision with time.”
― Emanuel Derman, Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life

“In life there isn’t always such an easy resolution. One has to treat people as responsible for their actions, and yet also recognize that they can’t help what they do. It’s always easier to regard others from the outside. But one can also try to imagine them as they experience themselves, as we all do, from the inside. Then it becomes possible to see that we all deserve mercy.”
― Emanuel Derman, Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life