Art history, as an economics major once told me, “is for preppy girls from Connecticut.”

Salomon bond traders knew about fools because that was their job. Knowing about markets is knowing about other people’s weaknesses.

They were the same as front-row people all over the world, only more so.

At that time I hadn’t had the education required to feel poor on forty-eight thousand dollars

Economics, which was becoming an ever more abstruse science, producing mathematical treatises with no obvious use,

Fear and, to a lesser extent, greed are what make money move.

Almost everyone on Wall Street took his money seriously, regardless of its origins,

People who believe themselves of social consequence tend to leave more of a paper trail,

No trader or investor wanted to poke around suburbs to find out whether the homeowners to whom he had just lent money was creditworthy.