“One of the things you obviously do is you have to destroy this notion that it’s okay to trade against your customers. Maybe what you say is you can be a firm like Schwab that has customers, but you don’t trade in anything for yourself. Or you can be a hedge fund. But you can’t be both.
Because the minute you start trading against the customers is the minute you start designing things that aren’t good for the customers. And the minute you start designing things that aren’t good for the customers, you start designing CDOs, subprime mortgage bonds. You start to misallocate capital. You’re trying to misallocate capital.“
– Michael Lewis, from his Bloomberg interview where he discusses his new book, “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” (on my reading list)
