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Book: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
Quotes of Book: Boomerang: Travels in the New
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  1. Michael Lewis _ Boomerang: Travels in the New

    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.
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  2. Michael Lewis _ Boomerang: Travels in the New

    Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.
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  3. Michael Lewis _ Boomerang: Travels in the New

    In 1980 only 23 percent of state pension money had been invested in the stock market; by 2008 the number had risen to 60 percent.
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  4. Michael Lewis _ Boomerang: Travels in the New

    Thousands upon thousands of government employees take to the streets to protest the bill. Here is Greece's version of the Tea Party: tax collectors on the take, public-school teachers who don't really teach, well-paid employees of bankrupt state railroads whose trains never run on time, state hospital workers bribed to buy overpriced supplies.
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  5. Michael Lewis _ Boomerang: Travels in the New

    What do you tell your mother when she asks you where to put her money?" I asked. "Guns and gold,"
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  6. Michael Lewis _ Boomerang: Travels in the New

    Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven't really earned.
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  7. Michael Lewis _ Boomerang: Travels in the New

    The smart person accepts. The idiot insists.
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  8. Michael Lewis _ Boomerang: Travels in the New

    When Neil Armstrong took his small step from Apollo 11 and looked around, he probably thought, Wow, sort of like Iceland-even though the moon was nothing like Iceland. But then, he was a tourist, and a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there. When Iceland became a tourist in global high finance it had the same problem as Neil Armstrong.
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  9. Michael Lewis _ Boomerang: Travels in the New

    Take whatever is thrown at you and build upon it. "Yes . . . and" rather than "No . . . but." "The idiot is bound by his pride," he says. "It always has to be his way. This is also true of the person who is deceptive or doing things wrong: he always tries to justify himself. A person who is bright in regard to his spiritual life is humble. He accepts what others tell him-criticism, ideas-and he works with them.
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  10. Michael Lewis _ Boomerang: Travels in the New

    What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they'd ever seen this little man," says McCarthy. "And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That's when everyone panicked.
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  11. Michael Lewis _ Boomerang: Travels in the New

    Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was buy Ireland. From each other. An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Irish bank losses have been the most prescient, has made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that puts the property-related losses of all Irish banks at roughly 106 billion euros. {Think $10.6 trillion.} At the rate money flows into the Irish treasury, Irish bank losses alone would absorb every penny of Irish taxes for the next four years.
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  12. Michael Lewis _ Boomerang: Travels in the New

    The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a "Purgation-Calendar." Then there is the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings. "As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!," to select but one of the seemingly endless examples.
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