Lying for Money Quotes

“the economy would tend not to the frictionless ideal, but to be made up of islands of central planning linked by bridges of price signals.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“That’s the basis of my proposal for a Golden Rule: Anything which is growing unusually quickly needs to be checked out, and it needs to be checked out in a way that it hasn’t been checked before.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World

“As we all know, even when carried out entirely legally, the production, use, and disposal of many modern products kills people in large numbers.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“In other words, the problem of managing fraud is the problem of management itself.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“One of the reasons why fraud controls were not properly built into the Medicare system, for example, was exactly this issue—nobody wants to say or imply that they don’t trust doctors.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“Denial, when you are not part of it, is actually quite a terrifying thing. One watches one’s fellow human beings doing things that will damage themselves, while being wholly unable to help.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World

“The Lost Bank by Kirsten Grind (Simon & Schuster, 2012) describes the fall of Washington Mutual and really goes into detail on the environment created by its sales practices.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood (Knopf, 2018) is a solid narrative account of the Theranos affair, but genuinely excellent in its description of how hard life gets for people who start to challenge a fraud.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind’s business classic The Smartest Guys in the Room on Enron”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“The other classic—if you can find it—is Donald Cressey’s Other People’s Money (1953), which introduced the fraud-triangle psychological model. Since this one is out of print and widely stolen from libraries”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“The cost of eliminating dishonesty has much more to do with the amount of legitimate business that never gets done.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“there’s something about the modern economic system that keeps giving fraudsters second chances and putting people back into positions of responsibility when they’ve proved themselves dishonest.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“They’re cheats, is what they are, and like people who cheat at sports, they spoil the game for the rest of us.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“The criminologist Michael Levi once wrote that, if you have no convictions or bankruptcies on your record, “everyone gets one free shot at a long firm,” and I’d be lying if I said I’d never daydreamed.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“Anything that is growing unusually fast, for the type of thing that it is, needs to be checked out. And it needs to be checked out in a way that it hasn’t been checked out before.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“if you have the ability to put people in jail or destroy their businesses and you’re not getting rich off it, I’d say you’re not trying.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“It’s a move oddly reminiscent of the way in which Trump Hotels & Resorts bought the Trump Castle from Donald Trump, and shows that nothing is new under the sun.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“most of the time, we are trying to manage or administer things that are too complicated to be aware of every detail at every time,”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“most of the information that you would need to plan an economy was “tacit”—embodied in personal experience, spread out across the production units themselves,”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“The easier something is to manage—the more possible it is to take a comprehensive view of all that’s going on, and to check every transaction individually—the more difficult it is to defraud.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“The self-organizing tendency of distributed control frauds ties into some very deep ideas about information, incentives, and economics.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“various idiots thought that they were much safer than they actually were,”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“The key to understanding the subprime-mortgage distributed control fraud is to think about early repayment.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“Given the prospect of making a lot of money, and the general deregulatory spirit of the 1990s and early 2000s, it was generally agreed that this was close enough for rock and roll.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“In the run-up to the 2000s financial crisis, we saw the development of what might be called a “distributed” or “self-organizing” control fraud.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“not wholly rigorous, mainly because it’s wrong.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“The Brazilian straddle is a portfolio consisting of a load of call options on one side, and on the other side, an air ticket to Brazil. If the market goes up, you collect all the profits on your call options. If the market goes down, you leave the country quickly.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“The problem is that spotting frauds is difficult, and for the majority of investors not worth expending the effort on.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“Silicon Valley, though, has a complicated relationship with “fake demos.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

“The central structure of the scam is that you take an industry in which a big up-front investment is needed in order to earn rewards at a later date—the crucial dimension of time that defines the commercial fraud as compared to other kinds of theft.”
― Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World