"Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt" Author Michael Lewis discusses his book, trading and the stock market on Bloomberg Television's "Market Makers."
Ronnie s’est dit que ça faisait vingt-cinq ans qu’il bossait dans ce milieu et s’est posé la question : combien de fois a-t-on la chance de changer les choses dans une carrière ?
Chaque matin sans exception, le système est apatride […]. Il ne sait pas ce qu’il est censé faire. Dans quatre-vingt-dix-neuf pour cent des cas, ce sera la même chose que ce qu’il a fait la veille.
« Un petit nombre de personnes – plus de dix, moins de vingt – paria directement contre le marché des subprimes, qui valait des milliers de milliards de dollars, et, par extension, contre le système financier dans son ensemble. Ce qui était en soi un fait remarquable : la catastrophe était prévisible, et pourtant seule une poignée de gens s’en rendait compte. » (p. 162)
Pourquoi prendre des décisions intelligentes quand on peut s'enrichir en prenant des décisions idiotes ?
It’s curious how knowledge is at once so hard to create and so easily taken for granted.
Indeed, if you are seeking to preserve a certain worldview, it actually helps to gut science. Trump’s budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire - to remain ignorant. Donald Trump didn’t invent this desire. He was just its ultimate expression.
The Mexicans, interestingly, had taken the new pandemic strategy of the United States and run with it. They’d Closed schools, and socially distanced the population in other ways that, studies would later show, shut down disease transmission. The CDC, by contrast, sent the message that each American school should make its own decision, which was a bit like telling a bunch of sixth graders that the homework was optional. A few schools closed, but the vast majority did not. The local public-health officials with the power to close the schools had no political cover to do what needed doing. In that moment it was clear to Richard And Carter that they’d be no cohesive national strategy.
« Eisman n’était pas seulement un cynique. Il avait dans sa tête une vision du monde de la finance qui n’avait rien à voir avec, et était moins flatteuse que, l’autoportrait dressé par le monde de la finance lui-même. » (p. 43)
« Ils tendaient […] à croire que les gens, et, par extension, les marchés, avaient trop de certitudes sur des choses par nature incertaines. » (p. 175)
When you think of intellectuals influencing the course of human affairs you think of physics, or political theory, or economics. You think of John Maynard Keyne´s condescending line about men of action - how they believe themselves guided by their own ideas even when they are unwittingly in the thrall of some dead economist. You don’t think of baseball because you don’t think of baseball as having an intellectual underpinning. But it does, it had just never been seriously observed and closely questioned, in a writing style sufficiently compelling to catch the attention of the people who actually played baseball. Once it had been, it was only a matter of time - a long time - before some man of action seized on newly revealed truths to gain a competitive advantage.
Chapter five. The Jeremy Brown Blue Plate Special, p. 97