What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them.

I think America has the best assholes in the world. I defy the Belgians or the Japanese to produce something like a Donald Trump.

Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising.

Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.

Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia, everywhere you go is completely insane.

I didn't know Michael Hastings very well, but one thing about him was always obvious - he was born to be in the news business, he loved it, he was made for it. He wrote about Iraq and Afghanistan as places he had always been destined to visit.

Being a wiseass in a groupthink environment is like throwing an egg at a bulldozer.