The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too.

The arrangement bore the same relation to actual finance as fantasy football bears to the NFL.

If you have a patient in a doctor's office who's just been told they have terminal cancer but there's this operation they could perform right now that might save their lives. ... They have a 90 percent chance of surviving the operation — if you tell them that, they respond one way. If you tell them ... that they have a 10 percent chance of being killed by the operation, they are about three times less likely to have the operation.

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.

When something happens people didn't predict, they find ways to explain it as if it were predictable.

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.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions--if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong.