How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
The Venetian was a jangle of seemingly random effects designed to [...] to alter your perception of your chances and your money (6.32)
Does this sound familiar? Like a Las Vegas casino, a subprime mortgage bond is specifically designed to confuse the person looking at it, manipulating them into thinking that it is of a higher quality than it actually is. You know, now that we think about it, gambling and investing aren't so different after all.
Quote #8
Wall Street was propping up the price of these CDOs so that they might either dump losses on unsuspecting customers or make a last few million dollars from a corrupt market. (7.11)
Even after subprime mortgages start going bad across the country, the Wall Street firms aren't done manipulating the market. In order to cover their butts as best they can, they artificially inflate the prices of bonds for months, using that time to sell off as much as possible. If anything, this shows that Wall Street's corruption has only grown worse.
Quote #9
For more than twenty years, the bond market's complexity had helped the Wall Street bond trader to deceive the Wall Street customer. It was now leading the bond trader to deceive himself. (9.14)
This is what we call the "Ouroboros" moment in The Big Short: the moment when Wall Street becomes so effective at manipulating the market that they accidentally manipulate themselves. Whoops. In some ways, this was inevitable, as the subprime market has expanded to an insane degree over the past several years. How are you supposed to keep track of all of that?