Ever since grade school, when his father had shown him the stock table — Michael Lewis (author)

"Looking into it a bit, Jamie found that the model used by Wall Street to price LEAPs, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, made some strange assumptions."

"A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasnt really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term."

"The model used by Wall Street to price trillions of dollars worth of derivatives thought of the financial world as an orderly, continuous process. But the world was not continuous; it changed discontinuously, and often by accident."

"All that was clear that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise."

"I confess some part of me thought, If only Id stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created."

"Incredibly, at this critical juncture in financial history, after which so much changed so quickly, the only constraint in the subprime mortgage market was a shortage of people willing to bet against it."