Liar's Poker Quotes

“Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

“The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.”
― Michael M. Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

“He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.”
― Michael M. Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

“In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

“The first thing you learn on the trading floor is that when large numbers of people are after the same commodity, be it a stock, a bond, or a job, the commodity quickly becomes overvalued.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“The Piranha didn’t talk like a person. He said things like “If you fuckin’ buy this bond in a fuckin’ trade, you’re fuckin’ fucked.” And “If you don’t pay fuckin’ attention to the fuckin’ two-year, you get your fuckin’ face ripped off.” Noun, verb, adjective: fucker, fuck, fucking. No part of speech was spared. His world was filled with copulating inanimate objects and people getting their faces ripped off.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“I have this theory," says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache Securities. "Wall Street makes its best producers into
managers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made a
manager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and often
neurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers, and they go
after each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts that
producing gave them. They usually aren't well suited to be managers.
Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another quarter get
muscled out because of politics. The guys left behind are just the most
ruthless of the bunch. That's why there are cycles on Wall Street—why
Salomon Brothers is getting crunched now—because the ruthless people
are bad for the business but can only be washed out by proven failure.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

“If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer’s pocket was a dollar in ours, and vice versa.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“It’s taboo,” he said. “When they ask you why you want to be an investment banker, you’re supposed to talk about the challenges, and the thrill of doing deals, and the excitement of working with such high-calibre people, but never, ever mention money.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“What Gutfreund said has become a legend at Salomon Brothers and a visceral part of its corporate identity. He said: “One hand, one million dollars, no tears.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“why they studied economics, and they’d explain that it was the most practical course of study, even while they spent their time drawing funny little graphs.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“I’m now convinced that the worst thing a man can do with a telephone without breaking the law is to call someone he doesn’t know and try to sell that person something he doesn’t want.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“You want loyalty, hire a cocker spaniel.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. —Sun-tzu”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but only a few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion. —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“It said something about the ability of the free marketplace to mold people’s behavior into a socially acceptable pattern. For this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“Donnie Green himself had been a trader at Salomon Brothers in the dark ages, when traders had more hair on their chests than on their heads.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

“If you are a self-possessed man with a healthy sense of detachment from your bank account and someone writes you a cheque for tens of millions of dollars you probably behave as if you have won a sweepstake, kicking your feet in the air and laughing yourself to sleep at night at the miracle of your good fortune. But if your sense of self-worth is morbidly wrapped up in your financial success you probably believe you deserve everything you get. You take it as a reflection of something grand inside you. You acquire gravitas,”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“There was one sure way, and only one sure way, to get ahead, and everyone with eyes in 1982 saw it: Major in economics; use your economics degree to get an analyst job on Wall Street; use your analyst job to get into the Harvard or Stanford Business School; and worry about the rest of your life later. So,”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“The game has some of the feel of trading, just as jousting has some of the feel of war.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“What was the secret to dealing with the assholes? “Lift weights or learn karate,” said O’Grady.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“Making profits on Wall Street is a bit like eating the stuffing from a turkey. Some higher authority must first put the stuffing into the turkey. The turkey was stuffed more generously in the 1980s than ever before.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“First, when all investors were doing the same thing, he would actively seek to do the opposite. The word stockbrokers use for this approach is contrarian. Everyone wants to be one, but no one is, for the sad reason that most investors are scared of looking foolish. Investors do not fear losing money as much as they fear solitude, by which I mean taking risks that others avoid. When they are caught losing money alone, they have no excuse for their mistake, and most investors, like most people, need excuses. They are, strangely enough, happy to stand on the edge of a precipice as long as they are joined by a few thousand others. But when a market is widely regarded to be in a bad way, even if the problems are illusory, many investors get out. A good example of this was the crisis at the U.S. Farm Credit Corporation. It looked for a moment as if Farm Credit might go bankrupt. Investors stampeded out of Farm Credit bonds because having been warned of the possibility of accident, they couldn’t be seen in the vicinity without endangering their reputations. In an age when failure isn’t allowed, when the U.S. government had rescued firms as remote from the national interest as Chrysler and the Continental Illinois Bank, there was no chance the government would allow the Farm Credit bank to default. The thought of not bailing out an eighty-billion-dollar institution that lent money to America’s distressed farmers was absurd. Institutional investors knew this. That is the point. The people selling Farm Credit bonds for less than they were worth weren’t necessarily stupid. They simply could not be seen holding them. Since Alexander wasn’t constrained by appearances, he sought to exploit people who were.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“The best decisions he has made in his life, he said, were completely unexpected, the ones that cut against convention. Then he went even further. He said that every decision he has forced himself to make because it was unexpected has been a good one.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker