As Idiotic As Optimism Can

A Tourist Can't Help But Have A Distorted Opinion Of A Place: He Meets Unrepresentative People, Has Unrepresentative Experiences, And Runs Around Imposing Upon The Place The Fantastic Mental Pictures He Had In His Head When He Got There.

Everything, In Retrospect, Is Obvious. But If Everything Were Obvious, Authors Of Histories Of Financial Folly Would Be Rich . . .

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.

My Client Loved Risk. Risk, I Had Learned, Was A Commodity In Itself. Risk Could Be Canned And Sold Like Tomatoes.

Wall Street, With Its Army Of Brokers, Analysts, And Advisers Funneling Trillions Of Dollars Into Mutual Funds, Hedge Funds, And Private Equity Funds, Is An Elaborate Fraud.