Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this.

They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.

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.

We aren't natural statisticians. What we are is natural storytelling machines. And so what we do after we have the facts in hand is build a story to explain the facts.

That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.

People in the voting booth are not purely rational creatures any more than they're purely rational creatures outside the voting booth.

It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.