[b]Michael Lewis
The Piranha didn’t talk like a person. He said things like “If you fuckin’ buy this bond in a fuckin’ trade, you’re fuckin’ fucked.” And “If you don’t pay fuckin’ attention to the fuckin’ two-year, you get your fuckin’ face ripped off.” Noun, verb, adjective: fucker, fuck, fucking. No part of speech was spared. His world was filled with copulating inanimate objects and people getting their faces ripped off.[/b]
No, not the fucking fish.
What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant.
Of course it goes without saying: Not just baseball.
The author refers to a player’s affected nonchalance and comments he is, “too young to realize you are what you pretend to be”.
Which then begs the question: Are you too young here, Kids?
What Gutfreund said has become a legend at Salomon Brothers and a visceral part of its corporate identity. He said: “One hand, one million dollars, no tears".
Or, in short, “fuck 'em”.
It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.
Not unlike the general managers in all the other fields.
A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn’t really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term. For instance, you might pay $200,000 a year to buy a ten-year credit default swap on $100 million in General Electric bonds. The most you could lose was $2 million: $200,000 a year for ten years. The most you could make was $100 million, if General Electric defaulted on its debt any time in the next ten years and bondholders recovered nothing. It was a zero-sum bet: If you made $100 million, the guy who had sold you the credit default swap lost $100 million. It was also an asymmetric bet, like laying down money on a number in roulette. The most you could lose were the chips you put on the table; but if your number came up you made thirty, forty, even fifty times your money.
He thought: Indeed, that’s always been my own experience. Or would have been if it could have been.