The idea that it's smart to allow Wall Street firms, with this "too big to fail" imprimatur, to become hedge funds again - it's unconscionable. You're essentially saying we're going to take some elites in our society and let them roll the bones in the marketplace, and if it works out they get rich, and if it doesn't work out the taxpayer comes in again. That seems absolutely crazy to me. That seems to be where they're headed. I mean, maybe they're not and I'm wrong. Maybe they'll do sensible things. It's hard to know! There doesn't seem to be a plan.

As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.

The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.

My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.

The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.

The Germans made just about every bad investment you could have made in the last 10 years. They invested in Icelandic banks. They invested in Greek government bonds. They were heavy into Irish banks, big into Irish banks, and they bought U.S. subprime mortgage bonds.

Jacks are home runs. So are dongs, bombs, and big flies. Baseball people express their fondness for a thing by thinking up lots of different ways to say it.