Sublime

(As his predecessor John Pierpont Morgan had said about a banker’s reputation at the Pujo hearings in front of the House Banking and Currency Committee in 1912, “[It] is his most valuable possession; it is the result of years of faith and honorable dealing and, while it may be quickly lost, once lost cannot be restored for a long time, if ever.”)

so deeply uncomfortable saying, “I don’t know” or “it depends,” especially in finance.

But overall the profession does not excel at seeing trouble ahead and unlike engineering disciplines it doesn’t have a branch of forward-looking failure-mode analysis or of post-crash forensic analysis.

The successes in my life had given me a false sense of omniscience and infallibility. The vast majority of the successes in my life were because I got lucky, not because I was particularly smart or better or different. I didn’t know it at this point in the story, but I sure as hell was about to find out.

The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald M. Weinberg.

Signal regarding your leverage.

A big customer creates customer concentration risks. What happens if you scale up production, sales, and customer support for a big customer and then that customer decides to drop you?

Eisman, predisposed to suspect fraud in the market, wanted to bet against Americans who had been lent money without having been required to show evidence of income or employment.