"I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created."

"A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans."

"These guys lied to infinity. What I learned from that experience was that Wall Street didn't give a shit what it sold."

"A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typica…"

"Ever since grade school, when his father had shown him the stock tables at the back of the newspaper and told him tha…"

"the more he studied Buffet, the less he thought he could be copied; indeed, the lesson of Buffet was: To succeed in a…"

"The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street …"

"Incredibly, at this critical juncture in financial history, after which so much changed so quickly, the only constrai…"

"Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly."

"I'd stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985, and stumbled out, richer, in 1988, and even though I wrote a boo…"