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Michael Lewis on California

aaron cohen — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:08:54 +0000

Michael Lewis's latest chapter length depresso is about California and how many of the cities there are pretty royally fucked because of pension promises that will begin to come due very soon, and in some cases have already begun to cause problems. One thing I learned, the states won't ever have to bust their budgets because they can force more and more costs on to the cities. (I guess counties can do this, too, because this is exactly what happened in Topeka yesterday, where the city council voted to decriminalize domestic battery in order to force the county district attorney to start trying these cases again. He stopped last month citing budget concerns.) Anyway, we're screwed, so here's Lewis talking about a bike ride he took with Schwarzenegger.

He hauls a bike off the back of the car, hops on, and takes off down an already busy Ocean Avenue. He wears no bike helmet, runs red lights, and rips past do not enter signs without seeming to notice them and up one-way streets the wrong way. When he wants to cross three lanes of fast traffic he doesn’t so much as glance over his shoulder but just sticks out his hand and follows it, assuming that whatever is behind him will stop. His bike has at least 10 speeds, but he has just 2: zero and pedaling as fast as he can. Inside half a mile he’s moving fast enough that wind-induced tears course down his cheeks.

He’s got to be one of the world’s most recognizable people, but he doesn’t appear to worry that anyone will recognize him, and no one does. It may be that people who get out of bed at dawn to jog and Rollerblade and racewalk are too interested in what they are doing to break their trance. Or it may be that he’s taking them by surprise. He has no entourage, not even a bodyguard. His former economic adviser, David Crane, and his media adviser, Adam Mendelsohn, who came along for the ride just because it sounded fun, are now somewhere far behind him. Anyone paying attention would think, That guy might look like Arnold, but it can’t possibly be Arnold, because Arnold would never be out alone on a bike at seven in the morning, trying to commit suicide. It isn’t until he is forced to stop at a red light that he makes meaningful contact with the public. A woman pushing a baby stroller and talking on a cell phone crosses the street right in front of him and does a double take. “Oh . . . my . . . God,” she gasps into her phone. “It’s Bill Clinton!” She’s not 10 feet away, but she keeps talking to the phone, as if the man were unreal. “I’m here with Bill Clinton.”

As a bonus, here's a profile of Lewis from NY Mag.

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Michael Lewis finally writing Liar’s Poker movie

aaron cohen — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:52:38 +0000

Michael Lewis is finally writing a screenplay for Liar's Poker. Finally. I've only been clamoring for it for two and a half years. "John Requa and Glenn Ficarra of Crazy, Stupid, Love will direct". Liar's Poker tells the story of Lewis' time as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers, the firm that pretty much created mortgage bonds. The leveraging of which, you might remember, were at least partly responsible for our current economic troubles. Why wasn't this movie made 2 years ago?

I went through my archives to see how many times I talked about them making this movie. 9 times. 9 times since February, 2009 I've wondered why the movie hadn't been made. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Now what am I going to write about?

Via Stellar

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Michael Lewis on hurricanes

aaron cohen — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 19:07:35 +0000

In Nature's Casino is a Michael Lewis article from the NY Times Magazine in 2007 nominally about hurricane insurance, but also about making money in chaotic and hard to predict markets. It's fitting today, with Irene fever gripping the East Coast. I'm pretty sure I posted this already.

But there was an exception: an American so improbably prepared for the havoc Tropical Depression 12 was about to wreak that he might as well have planned it. His name was John Seo, he was 39 years old and he ran a hedge fund in Westport, Conn., whose chief purpose was to persuade investors to think about catastrophe in the same peculiar way that he did. He had invested nearly a billion dollars of other people’s money in buying what are known as “cat bonds.” The buyer of a catastrophe bond is effectively selling catastrophe insurance. He puts down his money and will lose it all if some specified bad thing happens within a predetermined number of years: a big hurricane hitting Miami, say, or some insurance company losing more than $1 billion on any single natural disaster. In exchange, the cat-bond seller — an insurance company looking to insure itself against extreme losses — pays the buyer a high rate of interest.

The article is fascinating. Load it up on your iPad now so you can read it by battery when your power goes out on Sunday.

Here's a bonus Lewis column from 2005 I found while looking for the above. It was written a couple months after Katrina and talks about how someone was about to make a buttload of money in New Orleans.

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Michael Lewis reviews the Twain autobiography

aaron cohen — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 18:25:04 +0000

And it's not pretty.

It is impossible to imagine anyone who isn’t being paid to do it reading the thing from start to finish. Even I, who still hope to be paid, hauled the book around for six months on business trips and vacations, and spent vast amounts of time staring at Twain’s random ramblings in minuscule type feeling resentful and vaguely duped—roughly the way I felt a dozen pages into the Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc-before I could summon the energy to wade deeply into it.

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Brad Pitt Options Wrong Michael Lewis Book

aaron cohen — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 14:52:44 +0000

It says here that Brad Pitt has optioned The Big Short. As loyal readers, you'll know that I've been using the platform of Unlikely Words for several years to advocate for a movie based on Liar's Poker. Actually The Big Short and Liar's Poker could be released together as a part 1 and part 2 of the financial collapse. Shia Labeouf could play a young Michael Lewis.

Pitt's Plan B productions is going full steam ahead on an adaptation of Lewis' latest, "The Big Short," about the events that led up to the current financial fiasco. They're set offer Charles Randolph ("The Interpreter," "The Life of David Gale") $750G to write a script, reported New York mag's Vulture.

Every couple months or so, I do a little Googling to see if Liar's Poker has been optioned yet. Turns out it was optioned 20 years ago. Make the fucking movie already.

A few more Michael Lewis links to round out the day:
Complete Guide To Who's Who In The CDO Scandal
Goldman Sachs Is Doomed

On Oaths

We pledge to meet and even get to know ordinary people who do not work for Goldman Sachs, so that we might better understand their irrational behavior, and exploit it only when necessary.

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Brad Pitt Close to Optioning Another Michael Lewis Book

aaron cohen — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:57:40 +0000

Looks like Brad Pitt's production company is about to option another Michael Lewis book. One that hasn't even come out yet.

Plan B Entertainment, is closing on a deal to option Lewis's next book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a chronicle of Wall Street greed and the swollen U.S. housing market. Pitt is also considering starring.

I swear if someone doesn't start making a movie about Liar's Poker soon, I'm going to start typing in all caps. And I'll mean it, too. The fact that it's not a movie yet makes me itchy.

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‘Moneyball’ Film is Back On!

aaron cohen — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:10:30 +0000

The on again, off again movie version of Michael Lewis' book, Moneyball, is back on. Bennett Miller, director of Capote, has been brought in to steer this ship home. He will, apparently, be taking the movie in a direction different, and more mainstream, than original director Steven Soderbergh.

Here's a video of Michael Lewis explaining the origin of The Blind Side. There's about 15 people in the theater when he does.

If it's pettiness you crave, here's a bazillion word, 2 part series on The Forgotten Man Of Moneyball, Eric Walker. In an interesting move assuring a constant bias, the author of the piece is that forgotten man, Eric Walker.

Lastly, I'd like to again ask why Liar's Poker has not yet been made into a movie.

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Homemade Scenes from Moneyball

aaron cohen — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:13:05 +0000

Since the Moneyball script was leaked this summer, some folks took it upon themselves to shoot a scene, just to see how it would come out. Execution isn't flawless, but it is a cool visualization of what the movie will/would be like. I imagine tighter cuts and dialogue delivered a little snappier, but we can work with this.

Via Baseball Musings.

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The Blind Side Trailer

aaron cohen — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:43:24 +0000

I'm compelled to see this, but I wish that it hadn't been made so astonishingly formulaic. I guess we really did need Steven Soderbergh's oddball 'Moneyball'. And. Please! Someone. Option. 'Liar's Poker'.

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You Don’t Need to be Right…

aaron cohen — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 14:19:41 +0000

In a new interview on HuffPo with Terrence McNally, Michael Lewis explains why it only SEEMS like all the financial firms were full of idiots (instead of actually being idiots).

As a trader inside a big Wall Street firm...you would face a decision: Do I exercise my independent judgment and bet against this market, or do I just keep going along with what my firm is doing? If you exercise your independent judgment and bet against sub-prime mortgage bonds, you not only probably run into some political conflict within your firm, but you'd never make the big score for yourself... The minute you make a bunch of money from your bet, your firm is doomed. They couldn't pay you. So the smart thing was just to go along and hope it lasted long enough for you to get rich.

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Michael Lewis vs Matt Taibbi?

aaron cohen — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:56:42 +0000

If you read Michael Lewis' latest Bloomberg column, Bashing Goldman Sachs Is Simply a Game for Fools, quickly, you might think it's a brutal take down of the newest Wall St muckraker (Taibbi) by the grand marshal of Wall St muckraking (Lewis). Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, this column seems to be satire. I can't decide which I'd prefer to see, a Lewis/Taibbi Tag Team, or a knockdown drag out between the them. In any case, a good read.

America stands at a crossroads, and Goldman Sachs now owns both of them. In choosing which road to take, ordinary Americans must not be distracted by unproductive resentment toward the toll-takers. To that end we at Goldman Sachs would like to dispel several false and insidious rumors.

Thanks, Mike.

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Michael Lewis Didn’t Talk to Art Howe. Yes He Did.

aaron cohen — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:27:18 +0000

Art Howe didn't come out of 'Moneyball' looking that awesome, so he was hoping for redemption from the recently axed 'Moneyball' movie. In this article, he claimed Michael Lewis never talked to him. Only thing is, Lewis did. "Accusations of journalistic bias are the last refuge of the scoundrel", says Lewis, replacing patriotism with accusations of journalistic bias in Samuel Johnson's famous quotation.

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Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair on AIG – The Man Who Crashed the World

aaron cohen — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:51:03 +0000

Vanity Fair has a habit of posting stub abstracts of their bigger articles. This isn't exclusive to VF, Rolling Stone does it, too, but it is an annoying way of using the web. Barry Ritholtz takes them to task for this, and then publishes the PDF that they sent him to drum up publicity. If you can't wait until next week to read Michael Lewis' take down of Joe C and AIG that explores among other things:

How A.I.G. F.P. became the first stop for Wall Street banks looking to insure the massive amounts of debt they were buying, packaging, and selling: “We were doing every single [credit-default swap] deal with every single Wall Street firm, except Citigroup,” says one A.I.G. F.P. trader. “Citigroup decided it liked the risk and kept it on their books. We took all the rest,”

click above for the full article.

In other Michael Lewis news, you probably knew that the Siderbergh/Pitt vehicle, 'Moneyball', got axed last week. Here's an insider's version of events that doesn't make anyone at Sony look very good. Sandra Bullock's 'The Blindside' continues to truck, and still, for some reason, no one has made any moves to make 'Liar's Poker'.

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Michael Lewis vs Fareed Zakaria

aaron cohen — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:18:58 +0000

What's coming for the big banks?
"I think they steadily become much more boring. I think they steadily attract a lesser caliber people to work for them and they pay less."

"The people who created the problem are so powerful in deciding in what the solution to the problem will be."

I'll say it again. No one wants to make Liar's Poker into a movie? How can this be?

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Michael Lewis and Warren Buffett – 17 Years Ago!

aaron cohen — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:57:07 +0000

Somewhat lost in the internet hub bub ("OMG! He said what?" "Well, actually he didn't") around Michael Lewis' The New Republic cover story/review of a new Warren Buffett biography, is his 1992 jeremiad about Buffett.

Most fascinating to me was a paragraph describing behavior of the financial markets from 1982-1992. Close your eyes and think he's talking about 1999-2008 and it's spooky how well it fits. Eventually we'll figure out that you can't just make money out of nothing. Until then, I guess we'll just cycle through.

Still, in the short run he is probably right. You can frighten people into behaving themselves for a while. But in the long run he's wrong. The financial revolution of the last decade introduced to Wall Street all sorts of temptations to abuse one's position. When socially unproductive behavior pays as well as it has, it isn't merely a matter of needing a few more good men. The dirty little secret on Wall Street is that the men responsible for its current reputation were not exceptionally bad. They were just ordinary people placed in unusual circumstances.

Also of note, and the thrust of the entire piece, is Lewis dismantling Buffett's (at that time) pristine moral and ethical reputation with examples of deals Buffett cut seemingly at odds with his public statements. I had no idea Lewis wasn't a fan of Buffett:

This modesty is inconsistent with Buffett's vanity about his reputation as an investment genius. The main threat to this reputation--other than his performance, which has lagged the market during the past two years--is the strong academic evidence that success in the stock market is no different from success in a coin-flipping contest. The suggestion that he is merely lucky drives Buffett to distraction. He regularly ridicules skeptical professors with a vaguely thuggish if-you're-so-smart-why-am-I-rich routine. (The reason he is rich is simply that random games produce big winners, but pity the business school professor on fifty grand a year who tries to argue with a billionaire.) While his little rhetorical victories may offer him short-term consolation, they also reveal the enormous pressure on Buffett to vindicate his precarious perception of himself.

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Soderbergh’s Moneyball Animates Bill James

aaron cohen — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:20:07 +0000

Steven Soderbergh needed a gimmick for the Bill James character in Moneyball, so he has decided to animate him. Uh, that's a gimmick. Though, if anyone could be a cartoonish superhero to the Moneyball crowd, it's Bill James.

We have this sort of oracle character that appears throughout and declaims various issues and he’s essentially supposed to be Bill James. He’s your host in a way…. The background will be real but the person who is supposed to be him will be animated.

Note: At some point I may or may not get away from breathlessly reporting on all of the updates related to Michael Lewis Movies (See The Blindside and Moneyball, as well as the no brainer Liar's Poker, which would be so timely it makes my mouth taste acidy with adrenaline). This breathless reporting is also present for the Arrested Development movie. Again, it is unclear whether this will continue or not.

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Michael Lewis on the Draft of Michael Oher

aaron cohen — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:35:26 +0000

Michael Lewis comments here and here in the Baltimore Sun on the draft of Michael Oher by the Balitmore Ravens in the first round. Lewis' book, The Blind Side, tells the tale of Oher who was earmarked at 16 to be a first round pick at offensive tackle. "It's so seldom that things work out the way they're supposed to work."

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Demetri Martin Starring in Moneyball Also?

aaron cohen — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:20:43 +0000

"Demetri Martin will play will play Paul DePodesta, a computer-wielding Harvard-educated hotshot who became Beane's right-hand. DePodesta went on to a much-maligned tenure as general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers and has most recently been working in the Padres organization."

I don't know what I expected, but between The Moneyball movie and The Blind Side movie, and what's sure to be a Liar's Poker movie, there's going to be a lot of weird casting going one.

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Michael Lewis on AIG

aaron cohen — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:43:20 +0000

Michael Lewis makes a lot of sense in his latest column for Bloomberg.com, but he's also on the wrong side of the blame game. Blaming the,

Millions of people [who] borrowed money they shouldn’t have borrowed and, not, typically, because they were duped or defrauded but because they were covetous and greedy: they wanted to own stuff they hadn’t earned the right to buy

is simplifying the issue and lets the lending banks off the hook. It's been said before, but it's important to remember (and will become painfully clear over the next couple years) that in the bank/borrower relationship, the lending party has the upper-hand. Finally, as the one guaranteed financial professional in the relationship, the lending bank, frankly, should have known better.

But then this fascinating nugget:

Goldman Sachs, which received about 8 percent of the pile, or $13 billion, has claimed publicly that the money was, to them, a matter of indifference, as Goldman had hedged itself against a possible collapse of AIG -- by making bets against AIG.

If I understand this correctly, Goldman was making bets against the insurance company it was paying to insure its bets. If that's correct, is it any wonder we're in the mess we're in?

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Michael Lewis on How to Avoid Bankruptcy

aaron cohen — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:08:48 +0000

Asking for clarification doesn't make you stupid, it makes you smart.

From The Big Picture

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