Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they’re still all wrong.

the markets were predisposed to underestimating the likelihood of dramatic change.

The accounting rules allowed them to assume the loans would be repaid, and not prematurely. This assumption became the engine of their doom.

“All of a sudden I’ve become this caricature,” said Burry. “I’ve always been able to study up on something and ace something really fast. I thought it was all something special about me. Now it’s like, ‘Oh, a lot of Asperger’s people can do that.’ Now I was explained by a disorder.”

A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems, and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen.

“That’s when I decided the system was really, ‘Fuck the poor.’”

Eisman, predisposed to suspect fraud in the market, wanted to bet against Americans who had been lent money without having been required to show evidence of income or employment.

Somehow that message was mainly lost. Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State University who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual.