It is far better to keep the enemy close, by bribing him with stock options, than to have him out in the wild, foraging.

I don't think there is a national pasttime. Watching TV is a national pasttime. Really. If there is a national pasttime, it is watching TV.

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

The incentive for the outsider is to attack the system right up to the moment he is co-opted by it. The incentive for the insider -and this took some getting used to- is to allow yourself to be attacked, and then co-opt your most ferocious attackers, and their best ideas. The effect on the system as a whole is to make it more stable, because everyone winds up working on its behalf.

Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.

Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

You could argue the banks are much better capitalised than they were going into the crisis, and everyone's in a much more vigilant state because they still remember the crisis.