The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.

The Moulin Rouge is, like the West Village and the Nasdaq, one of those places that people who don't like to take risks come to for the thrill of being on the spot where risks once were taken.

At SGI board meetings... Jim Clark's face would get red and he'd start shouting that an investor and board member had cheated him and his engineers.

That was how a Salomon bond trader thought: He forgot whatever it was that he wanted to do for a minute and put his finger on the pulse of the market. If the market felt fidgety, if people were scared or desperate, he herded them like sheep into a corner, then made them pay for their uncertainty. He sat on the market until it puked gold coins. Then he worried about what he wanted to do.

I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.

There has been this - and it's reflected in the broadcasts - this moronic use of statistics. Which has suggested to everyone who is intelligent the use of statistics is moronic.

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.