“The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.”

“I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.”

“I have this theory," says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache Securities. "Wall Street makes its best producers intomanagers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made amanager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and oftenneurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers, and they goafter each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts thatproducing gave them. They usually aren't well suited to be managers.Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another quarter getmuscled out because of politics. The guys left behind are just the mostruthless of the bunch. That's why there are cycles on Wall Street—whySalomon Brothers is getting crunched now—because the ruthless peopleare bad for the business but can only be washed out by proven failure.”

“He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.”

“The relationship between the people and their money in California is such that you can pluck almost any city at random and enter a crisis. San Jose has the highest per capita income of any city in the United States, after New York. It has the highest credit rating of any city in California with a population over 250,000. It is one of the few cities in America with a triple-A rating from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, but only because its bondholders have the power to compel the city to levy a tax on property owners to pay off the bonds. The city itself is not all that far from being bankrupt.”

“Germans longed to be near shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis.”

“Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.”