Liar's Poker: From the author of the Big Short

Most of the time when markets move, no one has any idea why. A man who can tell a good story can make a good living as a broker.

Why did investment banking pay so many people with so little experience so much money? Answer: when attached to a telephone they could produce even more money. How could they produce money without experience? Answer: producing in an investment bank was less a matter of skill and more a matter of intangibles – flair, persistence and luck.

Our Europeans – especially our Englishmen – tended to be the refined products of the right schools. For them work was not an obsession, or even, it seemed, a concern. And the notion that a person should subordinate himself to a corporation, especially an American corporation, was, to them, laughable.

What Milken was saying was that the entire American credit-rating system was flawed. It focused on the past when it should have focused on the future, and it was burdened by a phoney sense of prudence.

“The casinos down here are dull compared to the shit we do.”

the new bonds made it possible for the first time for investors to lend money directly to homeowners and shaky companies.

It was as if he had bought shares in my future and was determined to make the trade come right.

this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive.

The markets in the long run are no doubt driven by fundamental economic laws; if the United States runs a persistent trade deficit the dollar will eventually plummet. But in the short run money flows less rationally. Fear and, to a lesser extent, greed are what make money move.